Although not the first Cat Video Fest, the 2024 edition has coincidentally arrived along with JD Vance‘s “childless cat ladies” comments craze. He’s inadvertently made it not only fashionable to be a (non-Trumpy/Vancey) cat lady but also to be a cat lover and/or at least interested in the idea of cats or maybe just allied with someone who is, and in all cases not necessarily even without children.
I’m going to make a not so wild speculation that included in this group are some non-ladies, perhaps like the guys featured, for example, in David Williams‘s 2016 book Men with Cats: Intimate Portraits of Feline Friendship. Also like my male friends and acquaintances who now proudly identify with the childless cat lady backlash.
Cat Video Fest is an annual compilation of cat videos curated by Will Braden. For the second year in a row, while vacationing in Provincetown, Massachusetts, I’ve been lucky enough to catch it.
Watch a brief trailer below:
Braden actually does this for a living—watch cat videos and root out the best—according to Ethan Shanfeld, Variety. “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’.”
Since 2019 more than $170,000 has been raised for animal shelters from theaters who host the film and then donate some of the ticket proceeds, states Jill Goldsmith, Deadline.
YouTube provides various clips of Braden’s Henri, le Chat Noir. Here’s one that’s representative of what I saw in Cat Video Fest both last year and this year:
Braden’s sense of humor apparently extends to the current cat-lady clapback. He, says Goldsmith, “recently posted a famous 1961 Hollywood photo of a line of women, each with a black cat on a leash (they were auditioning the cats for a horror film), adding the caption ‘2024 Voting Lines’. It has the most views of any post ever on the CatVideoFest site. The timing was ‘absolutely perfect’.” (C’mon, not “purr-fect”?)
The whole gallery of photos from that particular shoot is available at the Life website. When you’re on that page just scroll down to see them.
