“Wait—you’re here alone?” That’s a question I’ve received a lot over the years, the almost guaranteed first reaction of strangers when I strike up a conversation with them in a city that isn’t my own. I’ve mostly gotten used to it, first from traveling for work, and then from traveling on my own for pleasure. It isn’t that I don’t want to have a companion with me—my family and most of my friends just aren’t into taking trips, so it wasn’t something I got to do a lot of for a long time—but there is something freeing about going someplace you’ve never been before, with no one to hold you to an agenda but yourself. I can read in that question the continuing stigma surrounding doing certain things on your own, and being a woman on top of that adds its own set of challenges. And yet—and maybe I’ve just been extra fortunate—people have always been nice to me. Locals are eager to share their knowledge and favorite places. Even other, more seasoned travelers have been giving with their advice (I’m thinking about the Australian man I stood in line behind at customs at Heathrow who gave me so many food recommendations around London). When I traveled to Toronto last fall to cover TIFF for this very blog, I befriended the woman who so graciously allowed me to stay at her Airbnb at the last minute as she was preparing to leave on her own trip out of the country after my previous booking fell through while I was en route to Canada, even though we never met in person. All this is to say that Öte—the Turkish film from writers and directors Malik Isasis and Esra Saydam about a Black American woman almost the exact age as me traveling on her own through Turkey—connected with me almost immediately.
Öte stars Iman Artwell-Freeman as Lela, a 33-year-old high school teacher. When we first meet her, she’s just gotten off the train in Turkey, somewhere off the beaten path. She attempts to bargain with the line of cab drivers waiting outside the station, but they immediately clock her as an American tourist. At the same time, this opening tells us a lot about Lela; she may be in a strange country where she doesn’t speak the language, but she’s savvy enough to know when she’s being taken for a ride. When she does finally settle on a driver, amused by her efforts to drive the price of the fare down, he pulls over in the middle of driving her to have coffee with his friends.
Öte is comprised of many such spontaneous encounters as Lela makes her way across the country by train, by cab, by plane, and by backpacking through remote mountain towns. We do eventually learn that she does have an endgame for this trip—she’s meeting a friend in Armenia, a woman she texts intermittently throughout the film to let her know she’s safely arrived at her next destination—but she also doesn’t appear to be in any particularly hurry. There’s no list of sights she’s set on checking off as she goes, none of the sort of agenda-based tourism that prevents so many travelers from genuinely luxuriating in the experience, although the location titles that pop up every time she arrives at a new place charts her path with not just the name of the place, but it’s precise latitude and longitude. What we know about Lela we learn through her interactions with the people she encounters on her journey. When she picks up a guy at a beach, her introduction to him provides some basic stats: name, age, occupation, origin (she’s from New York City), and purpose of her visit (“pleasure”). When she befriends a woman on an overnight train who helps her get rid of a guy who’s been stalking her, we get a sense of her traveling experience. The woman tells Lela that she would be nervous to travel to another country alone where she doesn’t even speak the language. Lela responds that she once was, but that she started out small; first other cities, then other states, then other English-speaking countries, then other countries where she doesn’t know the language at all. Outside of an obvious curiosity about the world, we don’t really learn much more about what compels Lela to go on these solo journeys, but we don’t really need to. Isasis and Saydam root the film firmly in its place from Lela’s perspective, the camera reveling in the beauty of the landscapes (ancient ruins, rolling hills) and the joys of a good meal and an even better cup of coffee over conversation with new friends. Through Lela’s characterization, it’s evident that the filmmakers also possess an acute understanding of what it’s like to travel alone as a woman (the aforementioned stalker, the fact that Lela politely but firmly declines car rides from strangers) and as a Black woman (her race is commented on by the Turkish characters a couple of times, being unused to seeing someone who looks like her in their part of the country). Artwell-Freeman’s performance occasionally comes off as a bit too stiff, but it’s appropriate for those sort of moments. There are allusions to world events—the pandemic, and the influx of Russian refugees in Armenia fleeing their country’s war with Ukraine—but they remain in the far background, their brief explicit mentions more decorative than anything else, although to its credit the film sidesteps becoming mired in large topics it doesn’t really need to take on. Öte is meandering film (there’s no defined plot, and Lela arguably doesn’t grow or change in any significant way over the course of her trip), but its structure is in step with the nature of Lela’s meandering journey.
Öte loses a touch of that immersive spark, however, once Isasis and Saydam introduce another main character, whose perspective the film occasionally shifts away from Lela to. Yusuf (Eren Alici) manages a guest house with his family in a small village in the Northern Turkish mountains, and ends up reluctantly allowing Lela to stay for the night. We are introduced to Yusuf before Lela is—he’s negotiating some business with his family, his young sister desiring to take over management to their traditional uncle’s reluctance—and later, a trip to the post office reveals that he has recently (and, it sounds like, messily) ended a relationship. These scenes are important to Yusuf, but they’re a little too tangential to Lela’s story to fit comfortably in the film (especially as the information we, and Lela, need to know is revealed through conversations later in the story anyway). And because the first scene he’s in establishes that Yusuf must be someone who will be important to the story later if we’re spending time with him, we can pretty easily guess the road he and Lela’s relationship will go down. But their attraction to and near immediate ease around each other as Yusuf convinces Lela to stay another day so he can show her the local sights (and because, as he says, he finds her more interesting than anyone else he’s met lately; this part of the story takes on shades of Before Sunrise minus the sharp dialogue) is palpable.
I’m still wrapping my head around the final scene of Öte, and whether or not I liked it. On the one hand, it feels like a stock Hollywood happy ending, nice, yet rather antithetical to the nature of the rest of story, in which the protagonist is drifting but still always pushing forward. But Öte is the Turkish world for “Beyond.” I can’t presume what Isasis and Saydam intentions were when they titled their film that, but for me, there’s a gesture toward the things we take with us beyond the dream state of vacation existence. We take away relationships. We take away lessons, about the world, but also about ourselves. We become bolder, or more empathetic, or even more curious. Öte so resonated with me because it echoed these feelings and experiences that I’ve had for a long time, but also because it rekindled that spark of inspiration and adventure that drives me to seek out new places time and again—alone, but not really lonely.
Öte had its world premiere at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival on June 10. Runtime: 106 minutes.
Katie at the Movies 