Phases of Matter follows the day-to-day lives of various workers, such as surgeons, trainees, nurses, and imams at Istanbul's Cerrahpaşa Hospital. As a non-traditional cinematic documentary with an observant style, the film meticulously portrays the story of not only a hospital, but also a country, helping the audience to understand and empathize with health workers in a way that regular style of documentary filmmaking can't.

The documentary follows living and inanimate residents of a teaching hospital in Istanbul, moving from the operating room to the morgue, between life and other states, the real and the virtual. The film offers a look at a place where life and death, levity and severity, poetry and confrontation go side by side.

Roaming freely through the hospital, the observational style of this documentary flows into more free-spirited impressions of medical equipment, preserved body parts, medical dummies and a comforting reflection from the imam of the mortuary.

To add to the growing sense of impermanence, the hospital featured is also under threat of demolition.

Phases of Matter made its premiere at the International Rotterdam Film Festival 2020 and won the Best Documentary Film Award at the 57th Antalya Film Festival and the 39th Istanbul Film Festival. It is the latest film of director and artist Deniz Tortum, who is based in Philadelphia and was featured on “25 New Faces of Independent Cinema” by Filmmaker Magazine.

Director Deniz Tortum will be joining us via Zoom for a Q&A following the film screening.

You can watch a trailer for the film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFHt0-Hn_PE