It’s not a surprise to anyone who lives on the internet or has a feline friend of their own, but curator/editor Will Braden’s Cat Video Fest – which opened in select cities last weekend and expands more this weekend, just in time to celebrate National Cat Day – has been an unparalleled success. For the past several years, Cat Video Fest has brought meme, feline, and cinema buffs together under one roof for a good cause, to benefit local animal shelters and welfare organizations in and around every city where the program plays. And now in its 6th (official-ish) year, Cat Video Fest has proven to be bigger, more popular, and better than ever.
Every year, Seattle area based filmmaker and content creator Braden scours tens of thousands of videos on the internet and over a thousand more direct submissions to put together a tight 75 minute reel of the best in feline cinema. Given the proliferation of cat videos on the internet, whittling down over a year’s worth of new content into a single volume is a daunting, but consistently rewarding pursuit, one that harkens back to Braden’s roots as a feline filmmaker himself.
“There’s an art to it, but at the same time, my business cards say ‘I watch cat videos,’” Braden joked earlier this week on a call from Seattle. “So while it is quite a job that I have to do, it’s a huge amount of fun at the same time.”
Back in 2006, Braden started to make a name for himself as a filmmaker. Well, to put it more accurately, a cat close to him did. With the help of his mother’s tuxedo cat Henry (who lived to the ripe old age of 17 and passed away in 2020,), Braden created a fun and humorous parody of existentialist experimental cinema that was one of the first viral videos of its kind. How big was Braden’s series of videos featuring “Henri, le chat noir?” First, it won him an award – The Golden Kitty – from the Walker Arts Centre in Minnesota during one of the earliest incarnations of the festival. Second, his video was shouted out by none other than film critic Roger Ebert, who famously heralded that Braden had created “the best internet cat video ever made,” an accolade that still tickles the curator.
“When I was making those short films with Henry – or Henri, his character – I was thinking about the things I was parodying, but in a way I was more parodying as much the cultural idea of those films rather than anything specific,” he says of his roots in the world of cat videos. “Even if you haven’t seen any of these old French or Spanish New Wave films, you’ve seen everyone from Bugs Bunny to The Simpsons parody then already. We know the trope of the angsty, existentially dreading character in a smoke filled room shot in black and white. I was able to just parody the parodies. It never felt inherently cinematic to me, but rather that I was tapping into something people already get.”
“That was [back in 2006] when YouTube first started existing and I was in film school, and the second video was right around the time Facebook started coming up, and that was the one that really went viral and changed things. All of a sudden, I was thrust into this position where I went from being the type of person who was creating this stuff and wanting to share it with friends for them to see, I was more of a maker. I don’t say this lightly, but it was really an honour. I remember as a kid looking forward to reading the new Calvin & Hobbes comic strip every day, and sharing memes and new videos that you have found has kind of become the new version of that. To be on the creative side of it, I really enjoyed it. And now I’m kind of doing the same thing, except for the purpose of creating in-person events. But there’s truly something different about sitting in a theatre full of people laughing at all of these videos. And I can’t take full credit and say that it’s all about my curation. There’s something inexplicable about the energy of being in the room with others and sharing in this. It’s kind of like talking about the difference between going to a live concert or staying home and listening to an album. And also, there’s no ‘take your cat to work day.’ There aren’t many cat parks. So cat people have really used the internet as a virtual cat park, and I know I’m not the first person to point that out. Now we’re extending that into the real world. There’s grandparents, kids, people on first dates. Cats are universal, and those who love them all feel the same when they get together in a theatre, even if that’s all they have in common.”
That universality of cat videos and the wide range of ages that willingly flock to an assembly of clips they could spend days and weeks searching for on their own for free has translated into a major boom for Cat Video Fest. Braden keeps things G-rated, and wants the programming to appeal to audiences of every age bracket. Yearly repeat business, a continually widening platform, and a philanthropical base have turned Cat Video Fest into a sleeper hit, one that started with the help of small independent theatres and has been enhanced in recent years with the help of film distributor Oscilloscope.
“It is a little surprising to me, because a lot of this stuff is readily available and out there already, but there’s something to be said about the curated nature of it,” says Kristal Cooper, General Manager and Programer for The Fox Theatre in Toronto’s Beaches area, where Cat Video Fest screens several times this week. “Will is really smart about what he chooses and how he chooses to put it together. There’s a natural flow to the program. And people enjoy coming out and bringing everyone along with the, and everyone that goes can get something special out of it. The people who come out are really the one’s who make an event out of it, and there’s something special to that.”
“I love being present for any of our events because there’s always such an energy in the crowd,” Cooper goes on to say about the atmosphere of attending and working the Cat Video Fest, which will have a presence from Toronto Cat Rescue, one of the benefiting charities, at this year’s screenings. “The first year we did it, I hadn’t been at The Fox that long, and I was working the box office, and a lady came up and silently slid some cat ears to me across the counter, and she comes back every year, and every year I still wear those cat ears and she remembers it. It’s such a fun and lighthearted environment, which is nice to be a part of because there’s just so much heavy stuff going on in the world. It’s nice to be present in a space where everyone is excited to be there and in a good mood, laughing at silly things.”
Cat Video Fest came to play at The Fox in the same manner in which it ended up playing in other cities across North America. It was something that was starting to build a buzz on the indie film scene and theatre operators began to take notice. In the early days of the festival, Braden was booking theatres himself, a practice he says was extremely time consuming in addition to programming the yearly showcase and “wildly inefficient.” Braden believes that news of his hard earned success travelled all the way to Oscilloscope by way of Toronto, leading to the partnership he has with the distributor today.
“I think there were reps from Osciloscope at the Toronto International Film Festival, and they were talking to some other theatre folks, and they had just released Kedi – the documentary about cats in Turkey – I think they were talking to someone from Enzian in Florida and someone from Music Box in Chicago about our festival. One had just shown it and it was selling out, and the other was about to screen it and the tickets were almost sold out. I guess they thought it was about the right time for them to talk to this guy.”
“And it has been a fantastic relationship,” Braden gushes warmly about his partnership. “From the get-go, we just split things up halfway. All of the finding of the videos, contacting people, editing, music, and everything that goes into making the reel itself, they just go ‘Have fun, Will. Good luck. Tell us if you need any help.’ Then once it’s done, everything from getting digital cinema packages ready to having posters done is all them, and I say the same thing back to them and tell them to ask if they need anything from me. That division of labour means I get to focus even more on the cat videos, and they have this guaranteed new bunch of content that comes out every year. It’s like having a hit indie documentary that just so happens to come out with a new sequel every year.”
The box office numbers certainly speak to the longevity and viability of a theatre booking Cat Video Fest. If one were to examine the previous week’s figures, they would discover that Cat Video Fest made more on a per screen average – in just a little over a hundred locations – than all but the top four out of the top ten films at the domestic North American box office. Some of those locations being major chain cinemas – including several Regal Cinemas in the U.S., one of the largest in the world – something that Braden once thought to be unattainable for a project so seemingly niche.
“It’s absolutely gratifying and fun,” Braden states. “There’s this strange cognitive dissonance that I feel. On one hand, I truly feel like this is the kind of thing that can play anywhere. You can put this in front of every crowd of people and they’ll have a great time. It’s just a matter of who wants to jump on board and say they want to show this to a crowd. There has never been an instance that I can think of where we showed this to a crowd and it hasn’t done well. On the other hand, it is surreal to imagine someone walking into a Regal Cinema lobby and wondering if they should see Deadpool & Wolverine, the new M. Night Shyamalan film, or Cat Video Fest. For the first few years, we were only showing in not just smaller theatres, but only in the small theatres willing to take weird chances. And we still do a lot of those, but it has grown exponentially every year.”
Cooper, on a separate phone call from Toronto, says that part of the appeal of Cat Video Fest and the anticipation that accompanies it every year might also have something to do with the state of the world. As things get increasingly bleak on a global scale, the idea of attending a screening full of feel good videos for a charitable cause hits a sweet spot.
“A lot of our regulars come to this, and they look forward to it every year, but especially in the last couple of years things have really taken off,” she remarks looking back on the event’s growth. “I know last year we had a couple of weekend shows sell out, and we even had people lining up in sort of a rush line kind of thing. I wonder if it’s that heaviness and the good nature of the event and a chance to give back that makes people see this as a quick escape that doesn’t take up a huge part of your day.”
There’s definitely a sense of community that surrounds Cat Video Fest, which is a hallmark of a great cinematic experience. There’s somethings special about sharing in the joy of others all hanging out under the same roof, even when what they are watching are clips that are routinely the thing people share via social media and texts with their friends, family, and closest loved ones. It’s not just a case of escapism, but also the infectious nature of laughing at things that are funny or feeling lifted by something cute or tender.
“For better or for worse, especially in the stretch of time since I have been in charge of Cat Video Fest things have been tough all around,” Braden acknowledges. “Especially in the States, things have been so heavy, with COVID and politics and just the general state of things, and people would come up to me afterwards at shows I attended, and they would just put their hands on my shoulders and say ‘Gosh, I really needed that.’ Sometimes you just need 75 minutes of fun and not worrying about anything else. As you know, there are so many exceptional films out there, but you also know that not all of them are designed to make you feel great afterwards. A lot are meant to stick with you and make you think and have so much meaning, but you can still feel this heaviness like a backpack. This is the opposite. I want you to leave the theatre feeling lighter, like you just took a big stretch, which is something cats do very well.”
And make no mistake, Cat Video Fest is an inherently cinematic event. Both because of the charitable connection and because licensing clips from internet content creators can be a sticky situation, Braden creates these events expressly for theatrical exhibition only.
“When you’re doing or talking about anything online, there’s this huge grey area when it comes to repurposing content,” Braden notes when discussing the overall curation of the festival. “The ubiquity of reproducing things online understandably makes people very wary of sharing their videos or letting them be a part of something without letting them know what’s going on. We don’t reproduce anything online. We’re never going to go to streaming. We don’t make DVDs. We don’t do anything like that. We only do in-person events, each reel only lasts a year, and it’s always in service of raising money for shelters and animal welfare organizations. We don’t want to adjust things in any way, except maybe cutting something down for time. We always want the viewer to know who made what. We don’t need to put our own stamp on it. When someone comes out of the theatre, if they like one of the videos they saw, they’ll have to go and seek it out themselves and go back to the original content creator to see it again. I’m able to say truthfully to these content creators that this will get more eyes on this video and their cat, while doing something meaningful and spreading some good will without them signing rights away.”
But just as the only things certain in life are death and taxes, there are two other things specific to Cat Video Fest that seem unlikely to go away any time soon. First, cat related charities will always need help from the public to find animals in need homes and provide them with proper care whenever called upon. Benefiting those causes – including a number of partners that are listed on the Cat Video Fest website – is the driving force behind Braden’s work, and something the filmmaker takes great pride in. The second certainty is that as long as everyone has a camera, there will never be a shortage of cat related content to sift through every year.
“We all have these backstories for our cats,” Braden says about our collective obsession with people’s pets. “We imagine their personalities and anthropomorphize them and give them these larger than life attributes, when really they’re just cats! Getting to put together all these different kinds of videos, I appreciate that a ‘cat’ video can be pretty much anything. There’s a lot of accidental funny moments when you’re filming a cat and they do something silly and it goes viral, but there’s also a lot of intentional, character based kinds of videos, from music video type things to something that will take a documentary kind of approach. They’re kind of a blank slate. They have this imperious look about them. Within the context of a video, we imagine what they are thinking and what their expression is doing. That can be taken anywhere. They’re like character actors waiting for you to create the context around them. The idea that anything with a cat in it can be considered a ‘cat video’ means there’s never going to be a shortage of footage and ideas. I’m honoured to be a part of that history.”
Cat Video Fest screens at The Fox Theatre in Toronto on August 9, 10, 11, and 14, 2024. It can also be seen at the Princess Theatre in Waterloo (August 10, 11, & 13), the Apollo Cinema in Kitchener (August 9, 11, & 14), The Playhouse in Hamilton (August 10, 11, & 14), ByTowne in Ottawa (August 10, 11, & 14), The Screening Room in Kingston (August 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, & 25), and Cinema du Parc in Montreal (August 15 & 19). A portion of all ticket sales will go to benefit local cat related charities in the area where it screens.
