Sisters, Rose and Julia, don’t agree on anything, including how to feel about their dying Mom.

Tensions rise when their Mom gets attacked by her psychotic cat and they have to decide the fate of her fiendish feline.

A nurse, a needle, and a cat that just won’t die help the sisters to realize that there is one thing they can agree on… grief feels different for everybody.

TRAILER

SCREENINGS

 CREATOR’S STATEMENT

When my mom was dying, I suddenly felt betrayed by every movie I’d seen that had told me what grief was going to look like. In the movies, illness and the grief that surrounds it is presented as a sequence. There’s the reveal of the prognosis over symphonic music, there’s the woman standing in front of the bathroom mirror considering her shoulder length hair before picking up a razor and shaving her head. Usually a family member will walk on her. They’ll be shocked at first, but then they’ll take over. It’s tender and touching. Later, if she dies, she’ll say something beautiful with her last breath, and everyone weeps. It’s all so dignified. 

My experience wasn’t like that. For the last few months of my mom’s life, I was her primary caregiver. I was with her day in and day out, administering medications, cooking food she refused, proofreading her will for her, signing her DNR, and taking her to see doctors. I felt suffocated by fear and responsibility. I had panic attacks. I slept an hour a night.

And then as she got closer and closer to dying, something happened. You know how some movies are so bad, they’re good? It was kind of like that. Our days were so unbearably horrible that they became funny. She could appear completely comatose for hours, and then suddenly discover a shocking burst of energy that she’d use to catapult herself from her hospital bed downstairs to her other bed upstairs, with me chasing after her. After years of us having screaming fights because I wanted her to quit smoking and she denied doing it at all, she finally began to smoke in front of me, while maintaining intense eye contact. I had to laugh. Once I started cracking (really dark) jokes, the pressure eased up a little. And in a way, I felt like my mom and I found each other again. We’d been so at odds for my teens and early 20s, but for a moment while I was 23 and she was dying, we shared the same sense of irreverent humor. 

More peripheral family members judged me for how I was coping. They expected me to be crying or speaking in flowery terms about my mom “passing.” I resented them. I felt they were performing their idea of grief from the movies, while leaving me to do all of the work.

I wrote Kill Cat Oakland because I want to ask the question, what does it mean to “deal with” death and grief? What’s the right way to grieve, and who gets to decide? Rose and Julia are two sisters with very different perspectives. Rose shoulders the burden of day to day dying things, and she feels she needs her sense of humour. Julia is overwhelmed with fear and sadness and wants to make sure her mom is treated with love and respect, but she doesn’t want to be the one to get dirty. These clashing perspectives come to a head while they attempt to do one thing together: kill their mom’s psychotic cat. By the end, they each gain a little bit of respect for the other’s point of view. I hope that after people watch Kill Cat Oakland, they feel a little more alive to the many facets of grief. 

-Nora Heidenreich (Writer, Executive Producer, Actor)

TECHNICAL SPECS

Country of Origin · U.S.A.

Running Time · 11 minutes

Original Language · English

Format · HD Alexa Mini