A symbiotic creative collaboration between British filmmaker Grant Gee and Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, Innocence of Memories is a beguiling, meditative study of the indelible link between memory and identity, and the transformative power of love.

Taking as its starting point Pamuk’’s 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence, the film expands on the original story of wealthy Turk Kemal’s illicit passion for younger shop-girl Fusun and his subsequent obsession with collecting objects that she touched, from clothing to cigarette butts. One of the book’s minor characters, Ayla, has been upgraded to role of primary narrator, with her Pamuk-penned insights and memories (silkily orated by Pandora Colin) guiding the viewer through the multiple-layers of the narrative; Kamel and Fusun’s affair, the real-world museum Pamuk constructed to augment the themes of his book and experiences of Istanbul as it morphs from a relic of the Ottoman Empire to a modern metropolis.

These impressions of a changing city are, of course, Pamuk’s own, and he is also present in the film by way of a news interview about his work that plays on television sets in various deserted locales happened upon by Gee’s roving camera. As it glides silently through Istanbul after dark it reveals a city populated  by packs of dogs and men who make their living under cover of night; taxi drivers, commuter boat workers, rubbish collectors, some of whom lend the film their voices.

While Gee’s expertly constructed visuals (crumbling alleyways, decrepit buildings, rippling water and gleaming new builds) show the effects of the slow march of Westernisation on the physical fabric of the city, so these interviews combine with Ayla’s narration and passages from the book to reveal its ideological impact. Uneasy gender politics, for example, lend a fascinating subtext to Kamel and Fusun’s love story, and also to Istanbul residents’ changing relationship with their city. The fact that nobody ever speaks directly to camera, and that the city soundscape is kept silent behind the chorus of voices, gives the whole experience a dreamlike intimacy.

Given extra resonance in the aftermath of the recent suicide bombing in the city’s historic Sultanahmet Square, Memories of Innocence is a stunning portrait of Istanbul as a place being constantly re-shaped by the friction between the traditional and the modern. It’s also a powerful philosophical exploration of the relationship between the objects of our lives and the memories that give them meaning, wherever we call home.

4 stars

UK Theatrical Release Date: January 29, 2016

This review was originally published by The List