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Distant Constellation Details
- Year of Production: 2017
- Length: 80 minutes
- Color: Color
- Screening Format: DCP
- Language: Turkish, English, and French
- Screens with: Mixed Signals
- Subtitle(s): English
About the Film
Director Shevaun Mizrahi will attend in person for discussion with local filmmaker/curator Irina Leimbacher.
This haunted reverie drops us inside an Istanbul retirement home, where the battle-scarred residents bask in the camera’s attention. A creaky-voiced woman confides her personal account of the Armenian genocide. A sweetly deluded pianist performs a composition before confessing his love. A blind photographer fiddles with his flash as he points his own camera back at us. Shevaun Mizrahi’s playful, immaculately controlled film finds hypnotizing rhythms in the residents’ limbo-like state. Meanwhile, outside, ominous construction equipment transforms the land.
“Shevaun Mizrahi finds the ethereal in a Turkish retirement home. Soulful, humorous, visually delicate.” – IndieWIRE
Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2017 Viennale “for the way it explores the notion of time both literally and metaphorically, and makes use of a retirement home in Istanbul as a microcosm of the 20th century.”
Nominee for a Golden Leopard and Winner of a Special Mention at the 2017 Locarno Film Festival.
Nominee for the Grierson Award at the 2017 London Film Festival. Nominee for the Truer than Fiction Award at the Film Independent Spirit Awards. Official Selection of IDFA, True/False, Dokufest, and DOXA.
About the Filmmakers
Shevaun Mizrahi Director, DP, Editor
Shevaun Mizrahi was recently awarded with the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. She worked as an assistant to cinematographer Ed Lachman and was also a fellow with Marcie Bloom (Sony Pictures Classics). Her first documentary feature Distant Constellation was selected for the IFP Documentary Lab and the IFP Project Forum (New York), the !fdoclab (Istanbul), the […] Read More
Screens with: Mixed Signals
Mixed Signals Details
- Year of Production: 2018
- Length: 8 minutes
- Color: Color
- Screening Format: video and 16mm to digital
- Language: English
- Subtitle(s):
About the Film
“Stricken with an undisclosed illness, the narrator of this reflexive work draws evocative parallels between the darkened hulls of an industrial ocean liner and an increasingly disorienting mental state. Courtney Stephens was inspired by the nautical imagery and turbulent inner monologue of Hannah Weiner’s maritime code poems.” – Jordan Cronk
About the Filmmakers
Courtney Stephens Director
Courtney Stephens is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Her non-fiction and experimental films address the contours of language, historical memory, and women’s lives. Her work has been exhibited at the Berlinale, the Museum of Modern Art, New York Film Festival, The National Gallery of Art, South by Southwest, The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, and […] Read More
