Distant Constellation

With her patient camera, Shevaun Mizrahi makes a portrait of not only the elderly residents of a retirement home in Istanbul, but also of time itself, which seems to stand still within the building’s walls. An Armenian woman describes family memories from the 1915 Armenian genocide; an old charmer tells of his sexual escapades while quoting from Nabokov’s Lolita; a blind photographer finally ends up on the other side of the lens. While all these histories and lives move around each other, the residents are almost always somewhere else in their thoughts. And while people live in the past, or do little else but wait for death, a new building is being constructed outside—the future beckons. The cycle of life and death is unavoidably tragic, but Mizrahi also finds beauty and poetry in the fullness of all these past lives.