All Cats Are Grey in the Dark
2020 · 17m
Directed by Lasse Linder
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
An older man living alone in a small Austrian city is inseparable from his two Scottish Fold cats, Marmelade and Katyusha, who accompany him everywhere in a world intimately and exclusively theirs.
Picked by Zoe
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A film about an old man and his cats sounds like the safe-house default for every middlebrow festival, but Linder's refusal to sentimentalize or narrativize—just *lives* in this closed world—is genuinely strange in a way most docs aren't brave enough to attempt.
The essay-film tradition gives Linder permission to treat intimacy as a formal problem rather than an emotional one; the restraint here, the measured gaze at domestic ritual, sits in a lineage from Akerman and Varda that values observation over catharsis.
The singular move is how Linder lets the cats' presence define the entire visual grammar—not as subjects to be captured, but as the reason for every framing choice, every cut that prioritizes their sightline over ours, which transforms a modest premise into something architecturally precise.