Distant Constellation

The film exposes the idea of places as metaphors, mirrors, and symptoms for the people who inhabit them.

Mizrahi films one-on-one interviews with a shallow depth of field, so that her subjects appear with the occluded intensity of their own remembrances.

Far from the filmmaker in both life experience and proximity to the cosmic unknown, the subjects making up this constellation — elderly men and women who evince no self-consciousness around her — are diverse enough to support any number of theories about this graceful film's ultimate meaning.

The contrast between young and old, life ending, life continuing, is leaned on too heavily.

It’s a thoughtful, dream-like film, but, in the end, I’m not sure what Distant Constellation is saying about age or memory.

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.