TOKYO-2016 Moving images / Documentary_MV

THE YEARS IN BETWEEN

Elsie Slonim is a Jewish who was born in America during the I. World War. In 1939, she has met her husband in America who was, at that time, a businessman located in Cyprus and they moved together to Cyprus. As a Jewish, she has deeply experienced the pain of the II. World War as she has lost all her relatives except for her immediate family members, her father, mother and sister, in the Holocaust. During the II. World War, they have been sent to Israel, Palestinian at that time, as refugees by the British Government in Cyprus. However, they returned back to Cyprus after the war. She lost her husband and her two children between 2005 and 2011. Now, she is 98 years old and she is the only civilian living in the military Buffer Zone, which separates two communities in Cyprus, created after the war in 1974. She can only be visited with special permission from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After her first book‘Lemons from Paradise’ published in 2012, which was about her life in between America, Austria, Cyprus and Israel, she is now working on her second book that will also cover her memories about the Auschwitz.

I was born in Cyprus. I studied Engineering Sciences in METU and MBA in EMU. Mostly self-thought at first, I had formal education in photography on Photography and Camera Operation in Anadolu University. Now I continue my education on Photography and Video in ARUCAD. I have been invited to 4th Biennial of Fine Art and Documentary Photography in Berlin in 2016, Uppsala Fotofestival in Sweden in 2017 and group exhibition ‘Walls of Power’ in Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles in 2019. My work has been included to the Imago Mundi project of Luciano Benetton Collection.