It all starts with a girl running as if anticipating a disaster, followed by a real fire in a factory, with people screaming amidst the flames as if the inferno itself had surfaced on Earth. The next episode suddenly shifts to a calmer setting – the noisy yet ordinary world of the same little girl, Esma (the silently expressive Defne Zeynep Enci), who does not yet suspect how this incident will affect her life and that of the village she inhabits. Seyhmus Altun’s first feature, As We Breathe, which has just premiered in the Discovery section of the Toronto International Film Festival and will play in San Sebastián's New Directors section, is a string of contrasts: between a looming threat and domestic cosiness; between leaden skies, blurred by the smoky fire, and the dazzling greenery of the lush pastures beneath them; between harmonious landscapes and the characters’ inner turmoil. Besides this multilayered portrayal of the environment, what is impressive in Altun’s approach to storytelling is that he succeeds in unfurling a plot driven primarily by things that are missing, where the characters’ actions and reactions are defined by absences – a story fuelled by invisible and irrational forces that require intuition on both the auteur’s and the viewer’s part.

What is burning in Esma’s Anatolian village is the local chemical factory, making people and animals sick, and triggering an economic crisis – her older brother’s nose bleeds for no reason, the local shop stops paying for the family’s dairy produce, and her father Mehmet (Hakan Karsak), like most men who relied on the factory, is left jobless. But this industrial disaster also intensifies the ongoing, muted tension between Mehmet and Esma. This single father, left alone to care for his four children and elderly mother with no trace of a wife (is she dead or has she just left him?), has a highly strung relationship with his daughter, who is coming of age and refuses to take her mother’s place, demanding the paternal attention she herself still needs. The mum’s absence is felt in the awkward quietness, when a voice on the radio mentions Mother’s Day; in a tender moment with a cow licking her newborn; or when Esma pops on some headphones to block out the women’s household chores forced upon her. But it’s felt even more acutely in the lack of profound emotional connection and tenderness: Mehmet is adrift and abandoned in the task imposed on him by the authorities – to evacuate his family from the toxic smoke – and it is likely not the practical obstacles but the emotional void that holds him back; Esma is isolated and deprived of a mother’s touch, of the female role model so crucial during adolescence, which eventually drives her to explode in her own way, in a search for attention.

Melancholic, dreamy and ultimately poetic, As We Breathe is not simple to decipher and is perhaps not meant to be, in its entirety. Its charm lies in the ambivalence of the unspoken: in stifled sighs and emotions that reveal themselves through glances, gestures and movements. It’s also down to the sensitive lens of DoP Cevahir Sahin, whose wide, open-air compositions and tight indoor close-ups reflect both the soul’s need for space and the narrow confines of the reality in which it is trapped.

As We Breathe was produced by Turkey’s Jurnal Kolektif in co-production with Denmark’s Punktur Pictures.