Critics reviews

For all of the things some films could not show, there was one that reached out and captured souls well enough to let me feel deeply everything it held within its frame. Distant Constellation(Shevaun Mizrahi, 2017) haunts me still, with its howling wind beating against the windows of a retirement home that holds the final, gasping breaths of a remarkable cast of humans.

There’s an uncommon patience to Distant Constellation, in which director Shevaun Mizrahi installs us in an old folks’ home in Istanbul. It’s not that the film demands endurance, as with a work of slow cinema, but rather that Mizrahi has done the work of sitting with and paying attention to, on a minute level, those she films.

The resulting vignettes are funny, startling and touching. They offer an extraordinary account of what continues to matter to people and what falls away, and of the tenacity of some aspects of personality and the fragility of others.

It would take a telescope to observe anything exciting in “Distant Constellation,” Shevaun Mizrahi’s aptly named exercise in extreme-minimalist documentary. Said to be intended as a reflection on shifts in Turkish history and identity, it is too diffuse and withholding to add up to a cogent result.

Mizrahi’s first film, shot over several years as the American filmmaker visited her father’s native Turkey, is about all the big existential stuff, though a further step back from the void than Frederick Wiseman’s Near Death or Allan King’s Dying at Grace. It’s primarily a meditation on memory, at the moment when memory is all the individual has left.

“Distant Constellation,’ a documentary featuring residents of a Turkish old age home sharing stories of their youth, might not sound riveting to all tastes — but through the lens of director-cinematographer Shevaun Mizrahi, it is one of the more exciting achievements in nonfiction cinema in recent memory.

Contemplating life’s endgame isn’t something I like to do too often — we’ll all get there soon enough — but this is a both bracingly rigorous and visceral experience, with a steady gaze that acts as an unexpected calming agent.

Mizrahi’s pace is unhurried so as to mimic the slowing of her participants. The documentary isn’t mournful of their station—it’s aware that passage is the cost of wisdom.

It was presented at True/False as a work in progress, with, among other lingering post-production details still be finalised, an unfinished soundtrack; that it felt not only seamless, but holistically measured in both form and content, speaks to Mizrahi’s preternatural command and commendably empathetic worldview.