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“Haunting and hypnotic.” - Boston Globe
“We feel the hospital’s heartbeat; we hear this organism breathe.” - Reverse Shot
“[Tortum] crafts a vision pitched between the eerily posthuman and the urgently humanist.” - Museum of the Moving Image
"An innovative and unique poetic essay about healing and the healers themselves." - Filmuforia
"A damn engrossing sixty-ish minutes of watching." - Michael J. Casey
“Tortum makes us wonder at the things [the hospital] has seen.” - Jennie Kermode, Eye for Film
Synopsis
Phases of Matter is set in Istanbul’s venerable Cerrahpasa Hospital, a unique, state-run teaching hospital in Turkey, where the filmmaker himself was born and where his father has long worked as a doctor. It is a human, curious look at a place where life and death, levity and severity, poetry and confrontation go side by side.
This immersive documentary passes through the hospital’s darkened corridors from the physical spaces of morgue, operating and observation rooms to the virtual spaces of vital-signs monitors and X-ray machines. With a formal sense of camera movement that simultaneously embraces the unplanned and unexpected, Tortum crafts a vision pitched between the eerily posthuman and the urgently humanist.
Director
Deniz Tortum works in film and new media. His work has screened internationally, including at the Venice Film Festival, SxSW, Sheffield Doc/Fest, True/False and Dokufest. His last film Phases of Matter premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam this year. He was recently featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film.
Producer
Anna Maria Aslanoglu (istos film, TR)
Öykü Canlı (Yumurta Yapım, TR)
Aslı Erdem (Beatrice Films, TR)
Co-Producer
Fırat Sezgin (Institute of Time, NL)
Executive Producer
Cem Celal Bilge
Director of Photography
Deniz Tortum
Technical Information
Original Title: Maddenin Halleri
Country: Turkey
Language: Turkish
Genre: Documentary
Year: 2020
Runtime: 71 mins
Format: Digital, Color & B&W
Press
“We feel the hospital’s heartbeat; we hear this organism breathe.”
— Reverse Shot - "Critical Trials" by James Wham
“Had Frederick Wiseman’s ‘Hospital’ wandered into Lars von Trier’s ‘The Kingdom’ the unlikely result might have resembled Deniz Tortum’s haunting and hypnotic Phases of Matter.”
"An innovative and unique poetic essay about healing and the healers themselves."
“With a formal sense of camera movement that simultaneously embraces the unplanned and unexpected, Tortum crafts a vision pitched between the eerily posthuman and the urgently humanist.”
Best Documentary Film Award
“[Film’s] original language and innovative visuality render the invisible visible."
— The National Documentary Competition Jury, 57th Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival
Best Documentary Film Award
“[Phases of Matter] pushes the limits of documentary filmmaking with its bold approach, without disrupting its cohesiveness from beginning to end, makes a timeless film with its rich visual esthetics and minimalist sound design, makes us question and walk on the line between life and death, and presents the contrasts of an important system unknown to us and its actors in an original and sincere film language…”
— The National Documentary Competition Jury, 39th Istanbul Film Festival
Best Film Award and Best Director Award
“With the atmosphere it captures, [film] depicts the reality of our human condition.”
— The Competition Without Barriers Jury, Accessible Film Festival
“Phases of Matter is a singular work that fully engages the audience by removing anything resembling a plot and characters. It’s a documentary, but it’s more an art film. Whatever you want to call it, it’s a damn engrossing 60ish minutes of watching.”
“Without speaking on [the hospital’s] behalf, Tortum makes us wonder at the things it has seen. So lose not heart nor despair: in passing from the world, it finds a kind of immortality on film.”
