What Remains, which will have its world premiere in competition at the 74th San Sebastián International Film Festival, is the seventh fiction feature by Yesim Ustaoğlu, who previously shone in the Spanish event (scooping Best Film and Best Actress in 2008 via Pandora's Box), as well as in Berlin (in competition in 1999 with Journey to the Sun and in Panorama in 2004 with Waiting for the Clouds), Venice (Araf - Somewhere in Between in the 2012 Orizzonti line-up) and Toronto (with Clair Obscur in 2016).

Cineuropa: Ten years have passed since your last fiction feature. Why did this film take so long to come to fruition?
Yesim Ustaoğlu: The project started in 2019 and, since it’s a road movie, I was finalising the story on the ground whilst also pulling the funding together when the pandemic hit. It wasn't me who had to stop - the whole world stopped! I had to wait, and I picked the film’s development back up after 2021 while starting work on the documentary On the Dry Rock, which is connected to What Remains. I eventually finished both films at the same time.

The film is a road movie, but it’s also the story of a woman.
I wanted to create a female character, as I often do. I’m the kind of person who can drop everything and hit the road when I feel a heaviness in my personal life or the weight of the political and social lies that run through my country; when things become suffocating. I wondered what would happen if a woman who has duties, responsibilities and loving relationships found herself in that situation. What would happen to her? What would move her? I wrote a lot based on my own observations on the road and of the individuals I met - real people and places.

The main character is a poet? Why?
Because one of my closest friends is the poet Birhan Keskin. I love and admire her poetry, and we have a very similar way of looking at the world. We talked a lot about the character, and I combined my point of view with her poems, which fit perfectly with certain moments in the film, which deals with art, solace, freeing ourselves from the burdens we carry on our shoulders, new chapters, and access to true freedom. With this in mind, in addition to the poems, I wanted to use lots of other artistic elements: sound and its creation, soundscapes, listening, looking, understanding, touch, etc.

The protagonist is a woman, but the film also gives plenty of space to her partner and their young child.
It’s the story of a woman who can’t break free from a relationship and a way of life that oppress her. These feelings are buried deep inside her, and it’s not her husband's fault. So she questions the meaning of love, the meaning of freedom, the meaning of life. She looks for answers, but she also teaches her son to feel and to be connected to life, rather than just being a consumer. She wants to do the same with her husband, to create a new, deeper relationship without mutual dependency in order to truly be free. So she leaves, without any kind of forward planning, because she needs to break away. And this also opens a new chapter for the husband and the child.

The film takes the time to explore faces and to examine everyday actions. What pace were you looking to adopt?
It was very instinctive, and tied to the poems and places we explored. When you totally remove yourself from urban life, the pace changes, our connection to the present moment becomes much stronger. I experienced it myself meeting extraordinary women in the mountains in the depths of winter, in the desertified region shown in the film, and in an area where a damn had flooded a valley, which is the subject of the documentary On the Dry Rock, whose footage I used in What Remains. This allowed me to grasp the sense, the pace, and an understanding of these spaces, which fit with the film’s intention, which was to look and listen so that it really sinks into our minds, to restore the deep connection with nature that we’ve totally lost. But it’s an entirely personal kind of freedom, because it’s not just about leaving the concrete surrounds of the cities. It’s more about the meaning of life, compromises, the rules in place, including political rules, and what we give up when we live under such conditions. The main character strives for a kind of purity that allows her to be herself and to fear nothing.