Age: 33
female
Azie Tesfai is an Eritrean-American film and television actress and philanthropic entrepreneur. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and founded "Fortuned Culture", a company with the mission to design jewelry for charitable giving.
She has spent her life being looked at. This is the film about what happens when she finally looks back. Carmen Reyes, 26, is a fine art photographer living in Los Angeles whose work — intimate, devastating portraits of people in private moments — has made her one of the most discussed artists of her generation. She does not show her own face. She does not allow herself to be photographed. She has spent her career behind the lens with total control over what is seen and by whom. When a retrospective curator, Elias Vance, approaches her for a major exhibition and as part of the arrangement requests that Carmen herself be photographed — one portrait, for the catalogue — she agrees, despite every instinct telling her not to. The film follows the weeks of preparation for both the exhibition and the portrait session, during which Carmen's past surfaces with a precision that mirrors her own photographic practice. The film is a slow-burn psychological portrait about a woman who understands other people's interiority with extraordinary accuracy and has spent her career using that understanding to avoid examining her own. The portrait session at the film's center — lasting roughly twenty minutes of real time — is the film's climax and most formally daring sequence. Act One — The Archive Carmen moving through her own work preparing for the retrospective. We understand her methodology, her precision, the extraordinary intimacy she extracts from her subjects. We understand also the absolute blank wall she maintains around herself. Act Two — The Preparation The weeks before the portrait session. Elias's growing understanding that Carmen is not simply camera-shy. The return of Jonas as memory. Rosario's visit. Act Three — The Portrait The session itself. Twenty real-time minutes. The film's formal center and emotional detonation.
