Vague Visages’ The Cat Man Eshete review contains minor spoilers. Laura Checkoway’s 2025 documentary features a Brooklyn resident/Ethiopian immigrant named Eshete. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

The Cat Man Eshete, a 25-minute short film, utilizes a common storytelling device for a complex tale about an Ethiopian immigrant living in Brooklyn, New York. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Laura Checkoway (2017’s Edith+Eddie) establishes audience sympathy for her titular (and homeless) subject through a “Save the Cat” structure, in which the protagonist quite literally cares for a group of felines, and then reflects about his dark past while addressing personal contradictions. The Cat Man Eshete is more of a psychological character study — one worthy of repeat viewings, especially for immigrants — than a traditional documentary short about trauma and redemption.

Checkoway reveals her subject’s journey through a series of street interviews. Eshete, a former revolutionary, recalls fleeing his native Ethiopia (“a mountainous paradise”) due to government torture, and then walking through Sudan for a year to a refugee camp. Years later, he arrived in New York, where he lived in a Brooklyn apartment for two decades. Eshete ultimately became homeless upon exhausting a $300,000 workers’ compensation payment, thus forcing him to find new friends (cats) while finding solace through rock music and dreams about his beloved Ethiopia.

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In the “Save the Cat” structure, the protagonist must inevitably accept or deny change. In Checkoway’s 2025 short film, conflict arises when the subject’s longtime friends, Jeneane and her husband Anthony, discuss Eshete’s combative personality and refusal to accept help. For example, the protagonist rejects dining invitations and blames others when his cats disappear or pass away. At one point, Eshete moves to a subsidized apartment near Manhattan’s Time Square, but then returns to his pets after four months. Unfortunately, Checkoway and her editor (or editors) breeze through his section without much analysis, yet they make a clear point about the subject: he’s a man of contradictions, and for plenty of good reasons.

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Eshete acknowledges his revolutionary past but claims to be peaceful — this contradicts his profanity-laced messages on cardboard boxes. Also, the subject acknowledges traumatic experiences but rejects medication that could soothe his mind. So, why does Eshete stay in the street and suffer? This question is arguably the most fascinating aspect of Checkoway’s film. In the 1866 literary classic Crime and Punishment, the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky writes that “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.” And this concept aligns with the subject’s collective commentaries in The Cat Man Eshete: he finds peace in the street, presumably because it allows him to emotionally connect with past journeys, evidenced in part by the statement, “I admire myself for surviving all this,” along with a reference to Darwinism.

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My sister, a therapist, recently reminded myself and another family member about examples of invalidation in interpersonal relationships, such as immediately rejecting somebody’s perspective and feelings. In The Cat Man Eshete, the protagonist often comes across as confrontational or defensive, but maybe it’s not that simple — maybe it’s not that black and white. As the short film reaches its climax, Checkoway implies that Eshete does indeed seek (or want) validation, but that his cats provide more comfort and understanding than judgmental humans, perhaps because they don’t immediately challenge his point of view, and also accept his existence alongside them in the streets of Brooklyn.

The Cat Man Eshete released digitally on June 16, 2025 ahead of World Refugee Day on June 20, 2025.

Q.V. Hough (@QVHough) is Vague Visages’ founding editor. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film essays at Vague Visages.

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