Johan van der Keuken filmed with a photographic eye and photographed with a cinematic feel. Throughout his long career, he built a socially engaged oeuvre. The Cat was commissioned by Dutch television: fifteen filmmakers were asked to make a series in relay style for the popular variety show Mies-en-Scène. Each new programme would start with the last image of the previous one and develop the story from that image.

Van der Keuken wanted to spice everything up and introduced a cat: “We were supposed to work according to the codes of the crime thriller; I wanted to ‘sabotage’ that. I followed a close-up of a gun by some comic observations of my cat, accompanied by a text about the need to renew means of communication in film.”