Poetry in Motion: Yeşim Ustaoğlu on What Remains

Can a woman leave the routines that organize her life without her departure being reduced to abandonment? Amber Wilkinson’s interview with Yeşim Ustaoğlu opens a way to think about artistic autonomy through What Remains (Artakalan). It is a conversation about making the film, with the filmmaker’s intentions and working methods at its center. Wilkinson introduces poet Elif’s journey away from Istanbul; Ustaoğlu discusses how travel, landscape, poetry and sound shaped the project.

Attention is more than retreat

Ustaoğlu connects the story’s origins with a feeling of political and personal suffocation. Her account of travelling does not treat the countryside as an untouched refuge: she also describes emptiness, environmental change and people being pushed away from their land. This is an important distinction for a feminist reading. The freedom to leave a constraining routine is not the same kind of movement as being forced to leave a home. A landscape can hold both desires, and attending to one should not erase the other.

The discussion of poetry and experimental music adds another dimension. Ustaoğlu is interested in hearing and seeing what hurried life makes difficult to notice. Rather than treat creative renewal as a private reservoir of talent, the interview invites a question about conditions of attention: who has time to listen, whose interruptions count as necessary, and whose concentration is considered dispensable? These are questions that connect a woman artist’s autonomy with the organization of everyday life, without assuming the film resolves them in a single way.

Creative authority also has working conditions

Wilkinson asks about rehearsal, casting and working with a child actor. Ustaoğlu describes rehearsal as a way to build the actors’ understanding and trust, and explains the care taken with the child’s schedule and family presence. Such details make authorship less solitary. A director’s vision depends on other people’s labor and on how their vulnerability is managed, not only on the freedom of the central character.

This makes the interview valuable beyond the familiar celebration of a woman director succeeding in a male-dominated industry. It lets readers consider artistic authority as a practice: how a performance is developed, how a team works in difficult terrain and whether the pursuit of a film’s atmosphere is compatible with care for the people making it. Intentions described in an interview remain intentions; they should not be confused with independent evidence of every participant’s experience.

The producer’s page identifies What Remains as a 2026 Turkish-language production and lists its San Sebastián festival appearance. That festival record is distinct from a general streaming offer. This resource points to the available interview rather than promising access to the film. For a related reading path, The Feminist Art of Walking explores movement and attention through communal access, while Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice helps ask whose support makes another person’s freedom possible.