Eat Your Catfish (2021)

Directed by

Noah Arjomand, Adam Isenberg, Senem Tüzen

Genre

documentary film

Country

Turkey, United States, Spain

Runtime

1h 14m

Rating

5.8 of 10 from 5 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A fixed camera records the daily life of a woman in the late stages of ALS in her New York City apartment. It shows her, her husband, and their adult son handling around-the-clock care, financial worries, and family tensions while she tries to live until her daughter's wedding.

intimaterawcontemplativetenseclaustrophobicemotionally heavyobservationalpoignant

What happens

Eat Your Catfish is a 2021 documentary film directed and produced by Adam Isenberg, Noah Amir Arjomand and Senem Tüzen. A co-production between the United States, Turkey and Spain, the film is constructed entirely from a fixed camera placed in the New York City apartment of Kathryn Arjomand, a woman in the late stages of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). It follows Kathryn, her husband Saïd and their adult son Noah as they manage 24-hour care, financial strain and unresolved tensions around illness, disability and caregiving, while Kathryn focuses on living long enough to see her daughter's wedding. Eat Your Catfish premiered in the Envision Competition at the 2021 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), where it was nominated for the festival's best documentary award. In 2022 it won Best Documentary at the Istanbul International Film Festival and Best International Documentary at the Antenna Documentary Film Festival in Sydney, and received further nominations at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, the Turkish Film Critics Association (SIYAD) Awards and Sheffield DocFest. The film had its U.S. television premiere on 24 July 2023 on the PBS documentary strand POV. In 2024, the POV broadcast of Eat Your Catfish received an Emmy for Outstanding Social Issue Documentary at the 45th News and Documentary Emmy Awards. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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