'The Cat Man Eshete' Highlights the Lasting Impact of Being a Refugee

“Some people don’t care though. Homeless bum, that’s how they see me.”

This line is said by Eshete, the man whose beautifully complicated life can be glimpsed in this documentary. In The Cat Man Eshete, Checkoway follows (or more precisely, sits with) Eshete, an Ethiopian refugee who fled the civil war, which began in 1974, to Sudan, and eventually made his way to the United States, which he has called home for the last 40 years. But this documentary isn’t merely about Eshete’s displacement; its primary concern is on the colony of cats that Eshete has adopted even while he suffers from housing issues. It’s a tender irony; a displaced man creating a makeshift home for displaced creatures.

Eshete’s cats, some of which he has been looking after for over a decade, are named after public figures he admires or places and countries he likes. And even though Eshete has subsidized housing, he spends much of his days out on the streets with them. Ensuring their safety.

Throughout the film, Checkoway keeps a sharply observational gaze that adequately serves the story.

“I have a profound curiosity and interest in what makes us who we are and go into great depth,” Checkoway says as the film makes its worldwide premiere on June 16 on Al Jazeera English, ahead of Refugee Day today. “I find that with a very light touch, people can unfold authentically, and I want the audience to see Eshete and his closest friends for who they really are.”

And for Eshete, getting his story out in the world is something he is deeply happy with. “It shows some of my life, my journey as a refugee. I tried to express my love towards my beloved cats and my beloved beautiful homeland, Ethiopia, in the East of Africa — a nation that brought me to this wonderful world,” he tells OkayAfrica. “This very emotional documentary has a great potential that millions of people are going to pay attention to because it is a real and heartfelt situation.”

All from love

While it makes strong statements on the lasting trauma and impact of being a refugee, The Cat Man Eshete is first a love story. One that begins long before the conditions of its making.

Growing up, Eshete describes his childhood as one filled with love. “Love and happiness. Tremendous caring. Protection. Very protective family, safe. Like angels surrounding you,” he says.

Eshete also remembers his large family sharing everything down to a piece of bread. This is where his sense of community and nurturing comes from. “Caring is my nature. From the heart, my nature. My mother knows. She worried about me sacrificing for others. Giving myself, she worried. The family knows my nature very precisely. [laughter] Never change. Gondar gave me my greatest big family. I always owe Gondar province of Ethiopia a lot!”

In this documentary, the power of community is recurrent and steadfast. It intersects with how we learn of Eshete’s story and what he means to the people around him. It’s shown in the neighbors who help him feed his cat and another who gives him dinner. It’s also present in the neighbor who sits next to him at night and another who paints Eshete, and says of him in the documentary: “Seems like he’s out of this world because he’s not focused on what everyone else is focused on.”

Balancing act

The phrase Eshete uses to describe his journey as a refugee is “Hell on earth.”

“Every second is precarious — you don’t know what could happen at any second. Very unstable life. It’s traumatizing, you know? A refugee is a traumatized person, a displaced person, and also a heartbroken person. He’s forced out of his country. He doesn’t want to leave; he has to leave. Homesickness and trauma,” he says.”

Eshete lived in the refugee camp in Sudan for five years, a period clouded with hopelessness and homesickness. “A refugee is too homesick a person for missing his family members and his childhood friends and his community in which he was raised as a child, the rivers he used to swim and the mountains he used to roam around, and the horse fields he used to roam with his beloved father when he was a little boy.”

What the documentary does well is unspool parts of Eshete’s life without theatrics. In a conversation often with the camera, and sometimes with friends, we learn he wanted to go to university, and also about the underground Marxist network — which was working to expose the government — that he was a part of. We also learn of his near execution, which led to his leaving.

The documentary switches between his life in Brooklyn and snapshots of life in Eshete’s hometown of Gondar in Ethiopia. Filmmaker Checkoway says it was a filming process that wasn’t always easy.

“The film takes place almost entirely in the same spot in Brooklyn where Eshete’s beloved cats live,” Checkoway says. “Eshete didn’t have a cell phone during some of our time filming, so I’d walk on foot to make sure he was there and have a cameraperson meet me.”

One of the most heartfelt moments in the film happens when Eshete gets into a lighthearted argument with a neighbor who is equally protective of the cats over whether or not she is overfeeding them. It’s a moment that compresses their vastly different socio-economic situations into two humans with an instinct to protect and provide. For a moment, we forget Eshete’s condition and the neighbor’s conveniences and only see two cat lovers in a simple tiff.

“I’m protecting my cats. I want to save them,” Eshete says. “It’s a very spiritual situation. Very emotional animals because they’re spiritual animals, sensitive. Free. Let them be. They like independence. Freedom. That’s what they want.”

We also come to find that these cats are dying, and so are Eshete’s most prized possessions. In that way, the film makes an astute statement about the grief of loving. There are moments where Eshete ponders on the heartache that comes with losing any of his cats and what that adds to his existing trauma.

“When I sleep, that’s the only time I don’t grieve,” Eshete says in the film.

In many ways, The Cat Man Eshete is a sharp statement on the lasting effect of displacement. The way it changes one’s perception of belonging and sense of responsibility. The film is also about the power of community. It’s a film that manages to balance the hopeful with the powerfully devastating.

As the man himself puts it, “If I survived the hell of 50 years after the Ethiopian revolution and including the five years in the refugee camp of the Sahara desert, therefore I can survive any kind of hell on the face of the earth.”