Distant Constellation

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. The cycle of life and death is unavoidably tragic, but Mizrahi also finds beauty and poetry in the fullness of all these past lives.