It Must Be Because I Decided to Leave presents itself as a visual diary with a free and fragmented form, reflecting a sense of uprootedness already evoked in the title. What was the starting point of the project, and how did the decision to adopt this fluid structure come about?
I knew that I wanted to make a film about leaving, not as a decision, even though the title suggests it, but as a state of being. The footage was gathered over two years, while I was editing at the same time. The film became a kind of diary, or a constellation of thoughts that kept returning—about distance, absence, and the spaces in between.
Leaving is not a simple feeling. Or maybe it’s a tension I live with, between longing to go and never having arrived. I grew up between places, between languages, between what was expected of me and what I could hold onto. The idea of belonging has never felt settled, it fades, returns, shifts form. I often think of leaving the moment I arrive, whether it’s a person, a city, or just a dinner.
So the film needed to drift, to remain disjointed. Not to resolve anything, but to stay with it, as it is. That felt more honest to my inner rhythm.
The film constantly moves between dream and reality, memory and invention, creating a hybrid and multilayered visual universe, where very different images and impressions intertwine. How did you work on building this rich and contaminated imaginary?
I never felt the need to separate them. Dream, reality, memory, fantasy…they are all equally unstable to me. I just followed whatever felt right and let the images contaminate each other. That’s probably how my own head works anyway.
Within this visual and narrative flow, the main character is portrayed through multiple faces. How did you conceive this shifting figure, and to what extent does it reflect your thoughts on identity and the sense of belonging?
Using multiple performers wasn’t strategic, the idea came intuitively and I didn’t question it. I’ve never felt singular.
As for identity and belonging, there’s always been a quiet tension between how I see myself and how I’m seen. Many daughters like me are shaped by a culture that often values clarity over contradiction. There’s often an unspoken pressure to translate yourself into something legible, to belong on someone else’s terms. I resist that. Letting the character remain unfixed was a gentle approach to reclaim that ambiguity, and make space for identities that don’t seek resolution.
The voice over oscillates between everyday details and evocative, almost elusive poetic imagery. How did the writing process unfold, and how did you conceive this voice in relation to the images?
The writing started as something separate. I initially wrote a long letter to my family, which is just my parents and myself, and called it a domestic love letter. It held a few scattered memories from the past years we spent together, simply because we’ve always been living apart.
The voice over later grew out of that letter, and at times responded to footage I was collecting. In a way, the texts and voice are not there to explain the images, but to float alongside them, like small echoes, sometimes tender, sometimes unclear.
The figure of Oliver, the dog, is evoked throughout the film, taking on the role of a silent confidant. How did the idea for this interaction come about?
A silent confidant is precisely what Oliver is—simple and grounding, an intimate witness and a silent “victim” of emotions that surface without explanation.
Another recurring image in the film is that of a mysterious and almost threatening red sports car, an iconic object loaded with visual references. What does this presence signify for you?
The red sports car was mine for seven years. I never imagined I’d be someone who could project so much feeling onto a car, but apparently I did. The car came with its own baggage—desire, speed, ego, masculinity—which I wanted to embrace, even with some irony. But over time, that symbolic layer gave way to something quieter.
The car became personal. It absorbed memories and relationships, like a relic that ended up possessing a part of me. It wasn’t until I was preparing to sell it that I realized how much I had identified with it. I looked at the deteriorating leather interior and felt both a quiet grief and a kind of self-ridicule.
So when I was conceptualizing the film, I knew I wanted the car to have a strong presence—its color, its dents, how it moves, and how it stops. During editing, it became clear how it should live in the film. It holds a kind of haunting—not threatening, just persistent. Like a past that hasn’t vanished, only thinned. It doesn’t just sit in the frame, it listens, spins, interrupts. It moves through the girl’s drifting states like a trace, a condition half-remembered.
The various landscapes—urban and natural—that traverse the film seem to hold traces, memories, moods. What role do they play for you, and how did you work on their representation? What does it mean that “we all have landscapes inside”?
The landscapes in the film are extensions of the girl’s interior states. I tried not to assign too much fixed meaning to each space, but approached them rather intuitively.
“We all have landscapes inside” comes from a text message my mother once sent me, accompanied by a photo I’ve since forgotten. She often sends me messages like this: a photo of her daily encounters, followed by a few words or a single line summarizing her thoughts. They are usually straightforward, at times ambiguous.
As I was trying to make sense of what she sent me, I was standing in front of a brick wall of an abandoned temple in Ulanqab, a region in south-central Inner Mongolia. The wall was weathered and standing alone in the open. In the middle of it was a window without glass. Through its empty frame, there was an alien landscape, vastly different from where I’m from: scattered patches of snow on one side of a hill, red dusty ground beneath, all breathing heavily and glowing under the sun. There was no one anywhere within my sight. I stood in the shadows, but there was no roof above. What seemed to divide the two worlds was this freestanding brick wall.
In that long moment, I felt a deep sense of solitude and relief—this must be what she meant—that this brick-framed strange landscape was, in fact, my reality inverted, and what lived inside me.
Interview by Marco Cipollini
