Interview with Ozan Yoleri, the director of "Inpaintings", interviewer Edvinas Pukšta
"Ozan Yoleri is a young Turkish director and screenwriter, whose debut full-length feature film “Inpaintings” feels startingly contemporary by virtue of the director’s documentalistic approach. Yoleri graduated the University of Bogazici with a minor in film and has given lectures on film photography and techniques and directed multiple short films, including “Aylin” (2019). Currently, in addition to working on film projects, he is doing a Masters in International Economics at the University of Istanbul.
Yoleri describes that he wanted to create the movie with as few cuts as possible, which naturally created a similar feel to a documentary. ""The camera, sometimes lazily, sometimes effortlessly follows [the protagonist]...We wanted it to be a true portrait.""
“Inpaintings” follows the change of course in Defne’s life after a shattering event. She decides to drop her PhD studies in Paris and move back to Istanbul, where she is met by an unimpressed mother and a loving grandfather, who shortly falls ill and requires a lot of care. When Defne receives an offer to restore a historical oil painting, it becomes a way to simultaneously learn to heal her own heart in the process of learning to repair the piece of art.
The title draws a parallel between Defne's life and profession. Inpainting means the process of fixing paintings when there is a missing part of a painting that has to be filled and then repainted. Similarly, she is filling a missing piece of her life, not with a perfect replica, but with equivalent matter. The directors worked closely with restaurateurs throughout the process and learned to know the ins and outs of the techniques in order to achieve incredible accuracy.
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