I don’t even really like cats, and yet here I am, slightly hungover on a Saturday morning, shoving popcorn in my face at one of New York’s finest cinemas watching hundreds of kitty videos back to back to back on the big screen.
Welcome to Cat Video Fest, which is less a festival than a film — well, a 73-minute medley of cat videos compiled from around the world and screened in more than a hundred movie theaters across the U.S. and Canada, to be exact. The event has grown steadily for the past few years. Its 2024 edition, held Aug. 3 and 4, netted $280,000, doubling its 2023 gross and raising nearly $30,000 for local animal shelters and welfare organizations. Due to the film’s success, nearly half of Cat Video Fest’s theatrical partners (including Manhattan’s IFC Center, where I saw it) have added dates.
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Cat Video Fest is headed by Will Braden, who helped curate the event with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis before taking over in 2016. Running the fest independently, Braden says he spends a third of the year collecting clips, getting clearance from content creators and keeping track of the videos on an Excel sheet; a third of the year editing the film together; and a third of the year coordinating with distributor Oscilloscope Labs and doing press.
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“It’s my full-time job. My business cards say I watch cat videos,” Braden tells Variety. “Though I will say my wife is a first-grade public school teacher, and she makes a little bit more than me per year.”
Braden graduated from the Seattle Film Institute in 2006, and an installment of his own short film series “Henri,” about a “depressed French existential cat,” appears in this year’s reel. “I didn’t have this plan when I was in film school, but I definitely wasn’t thinking I was going to be the next Martin Scorsese,” he laughs. “As long as people laugh, and as long as we raise money for cats in need, then I’ll have the greatest job ever for as long as I want it.”
The great thing about Cat Video Fest is that it’s exactly what you think it is: 73 minutes of nonstop cat videos. It feels like a wholesome time capsule of the early-YouTube internet, or perhaps your grandmother’s Facebook feed. It’s I Can Has Cheezburger?: The Movie. There’s no larger narrative or even uniformity between the clips. Some are in vertical format while others fill the widescreen. Some have captions and emojis strewn across the frame. Some are in high definition and others, to borrow an early-YouTube phrase, are recorded with a toaster.
There are grumpy cats, feisty cats, helpful cats, cuddly cats. Cats playing piano. Cats pissing off dogs. Cats jumping off rocks set to audio from the parkour cold open of “The Office.” Cats breastfeeding set to Stewie from “Family Guy” saying, “Mom, mommy, mama,” etc. Cats scaling the walls of a kitchen set to a dubstep remix of “Spider Pig,” from 2007’s “The Simpsons Movie.”
The videos are painstakingly sourced and curated by Braden, who says he watches 15,000 cat videos per year and selects about 200 for the reel. “You’re going to see stuff from other countries, things that aren’t even online yet, things from student films,” Braden promises. He knows the experience has to be enticing enough to claw people out of bed and into the cinemas. “Plus, when you watch cat videos at home, you’re probably not raising any money for shelters,” he adds.
But the best part of Cat Video Fest is the children’s laughter, which echoed throughout the IFC Center and warmed even my cat-neutral heart. And as vice presidential candidate JD Vance decries that “childless cat ladies” are ruining America, it was refreshing to be surrounded by so many feline lovers having a good time at the movies.
When I ask him about Vance, Braden sighs. “His comments are pretty indicative of an outdated way of thinking about not just cat ladies but anybody who enjoys anything — that it must immediately be an object of derision,” he says. “The great thing about Cat Video Fest is that it’s very hard to sit amongst hundreds of other people in a theater laughing and enjoying and feel ashamed. It’s next to impossible.”
