With The Sleeping Cat, Joël Bartoloméo, who began his videographic work at the dawn of the 1990s, offers a new opus of his study of family intimacy. He captures rather than stages his daughter Coline, who is busy putting a cat to sleep. As she becomes exasperated, the little girl’s gestures become increasingly violent. However, the cat does not retaliate; the animal endures, and so does the viewer. Faced with these sometimes unbearable “quality-less images,” we come to expect a just reaction from the animal; we start to hate the child, and then we question what is really at play in this raw and brutal film. We suddenly understand that the confusion it achieves in us might be what makes the film work. One could waver between different points of view—that of the cat, the child, or the filmmaker father. This may lead to a slightly defensive reflection on what childish cruelty says about humanity’s paradoxical attitude toward the rest of the living world.