Eat Your Catfish

Eat Your Catfish (2021)

New Yorker Kathryn has the deadly disease ALS and is completely paralyzed. She can only communicate by pointing out letters with her eyes on a special keyboard and she needs 24-hour care. It’s a horrific situation that Kathryn puts into words incisively and pragmatically. The only reason she hasn’t asked to be taken off life support yet, she says, is that she isn’t ready to say goodbye to her children. She wants at least to experience her daughter Minou’s wedding day.

Date of release
2021-11-20
TMDB
5.8 / 10 (5)
Runtime
1h 14m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Noah Arjomand, Adam Isenberg, Senem Tüzen

Interesting facts

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.

Production

The project consists of filming by Noah Amir Arjomand, Kathryn’s son, who documented life in the family apartment as she entered late-stage ALS. Over several months the filmmakers accumulated around 930 hours of material, all shot without a crew present from a fixed camera locked to Kathryn’s point of view.

The film was produced by Zela Film, a company co-founded by Tüzen and Isenberg, with all three directors also serving as producers. Arjomand is credited as cinematographer, while Isenberg and Tüzen edited the film. The score was composed by Daniel Whitworth.

In interviews the directors have described the formal constraint of the fixed camera as both a practical solution to working in a small, medically intensive space and an ethical choice intended to foreground Kathryn’s subjective perspective rather than an external observational gaze.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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