Documentary filmmaker Kazuhiro Soda is a cat person — felines appear throughout his body of work, though mostly as bit players. In “The Cats of Gokogu Shrine,” what he describes as his 10th “observational film,” they finally take center stage, with his focus being the cats who live on the grounds of the title shrine in Ushimado, a town in Okayama Prefecture where Soda and his wife-slash-producer have lived for several years.
But this absorbing and penetrating film, which premiered at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, does not target cat lovers with the kawaii antics and adventures of beloved pets. Its cats are strays that locals and visitors feed but do not adopt. And though Soda’s camera affectionately tracks the felines on their daily rounds, from sunning themselves on the shrine steps to competing for fish tossed by local fishermen, it does not anthropomorphize them. They have names but not Disney-esque personalities.
Instead, following the “10 commandments” for documentary filmmaking that he long ago devised, including no voiceovers, background music or preproduction research, Soda has made an intimate, complex portrait of not just the cats and their allies but also a community in decline — a community of which he is a recent but concerned member.
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