Interview! Aaron Hancox & Michael McNamara, Directors of Catwalk: Tales from the Cat Show Circuit

“You don’t have to be a cat person to love this movie.”

Aaron Hancox and Michael McNamara of Markham Street Films join Stacy in this episode to talk about their documentary,Catwalk: Tales from the Cat Show Circuit, which follows the Canadian competitive cat show world. Aaron is a long-time cat guy whose cat Beau was adopted from a Toronto rescue, but Michael is actually allergic to cats! Aaron stumbled across a local cat show and was surprised and fascinated by how serious and competitive the cat show world was. “If I’m a cat person and I don’t know about this,” he thought, “presumably many people don’t know about this.” And to Aaron, that was the perfect premise for a documentary.

During the year-long process, he and Michael followed several cats and their people through the competitive cat show circuit, and learned the complex rules of how cat shows work. In Canada, the cat show season lasts about ten months, and there are shows basically every weekend. Aaron and Michael tell us that cat shows differ from many dog shows in that they are more like beauty pageants, and they tend to be more technical than dog shows—and have more complicated point structures.

Aaron and Michael talk about the opportunities for non-purebred cats in these shows, and they look at this film as being just one part of a larger conversation about cats. During the filming of the documentary, they came to understand that the people who participate in cat shows see themselves as part of the solution in terms of issues facing cats, and they do their best to help in many ways, from making sure that shows work only with truly responsible breeders to donating cat show proceeds to rescue groups.