Bruce and Terry Jenkins planted gardens and built elaborate outdoor enclosures and bridges, turning their Florida backyard into a paradise for senior cats to spend their remaining days. The retired couple opened Cats Cradle Foundation in 2015, with the purpose of helping cats that aren’t just in their golden years but have run out of options and would otherwise face homelessness. Their unique rescue story is the subject of Cat Town, USA, a moving 73-minute documentary screened on Saturday at Milwaukee Film’s Dialogues Documentary Festival.
The film combines interviews, mostly with the Jenkinses, and footage of the cats as they navigate daily life in their retirement home, along with chickens, parakeets and a miniature horse named Shortcake that periodically races around the grounds. (At one point, they also had a couple of pot-bellied pigs, an arrangement they put a stop to when one of pigs was caught mounting Shortcake.)
In the first minutes of the film, we see the inevitable result of caring for older cats – their passing – as the Jenkinses spread the ashes of a favorite resident/community leader named Mr. Cheeks in the private Butterfly Memorial Garden. Terry Jenkins introduces us to several of the residents, including Garfield (an orange female and at age 20, their oldest cat), a boy in an ivory coat named Bumble, and Nathan, a black cat whose human brother visits with a framed photo of Nathan’s deceased human mother so that Nathan can still feel close to her.
Maintaining the sanctuary and caring for the cats (with some help) are monumental tasks that the couple clearly see as their calling, and they treat the creatures with incredible respect and empathy – celebrating birthdays and keeping detailed files on every feline that’s ever lived there (according to a 2023 video from AARP, they’d rescued more than 350 cats).
The filmmaker – Jonathan Napolitano – gives them all, human and feline alike, the same deference. This is a story about commitment, honor and love that also spreads a deeper message – that these elder creatures haven’t stopped being worthy of love, and that these humans – elders too – who aren’t afraid to walk the hardest path any pet owner will ever walk still have so much to contribute to our world.
