A woman boards an empty red double-decker bus somewhere in Chennai. Nobody planned for it to be empty. The bus just was.
That is how What Remains, a music film, gets made. Director Arjun Madhavan set out one morning with a small team, a first-time actor named Arudhra, and Amritha Thankachy’s song Golden Boat playing somewhere in the back of his mind. What they came back with by dusk was something the city largely handed them.
Golden Boat, for those unfamiliar, is indie artiste Amritha Thankachy’s quietly arresting song drawn from Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry. It carries what she describes as “hope and peace in self-found closures.” Not grief exactly. Not resolution either. Something in between, where a person has accepted something and is still figuring out what to do with that acceptance. The song did not originate in Chennai. Amritha is a Kerala artiste based in London. And yet the music film found the song its most natural home.
Arjun did not make a literal translation of the lyrics. He made a response to them. A woman moving through the city, carrying memory in ordinary moments, not dramatising it. Besant Nagar Beach at dawn with its cold light. The steam off a chai glass. Museum stairs mid-morning. The tides ebbing and flowing. “All the nuances that actually moved through the film were all Chennai’s, not mine," he says.
The film's quietness was intentional. "I didn't want to fight that," Arjun says of Chennai's constant motion. "I wanted her stillness to exist inside it." Rather than isolating the protagonist from the city's traffic, buses and crowds, he chose to frame her within them. "Solitude here isn't the absence of the world, it's a way of moving through it without needing it to notice you back." That approach extended to the production itself. Shot over a single day using only natural light, What Remains was built around a tightly planned emotional structure but left room for the city to intervene. An empty red double-decker bus, a white horse passing by, a pink flower caught in the beach creepers, the changing tide — none of these moments were scripted. "Chennai kept handing us small gifts, and the edit just had room enough to stitch them together," he says. "I've always believed that magic happens in that unplanned 20 per cent of the whole thing."
When Amritha watched the finished film, it surprised her. “It revealed something entirely new to me,” she says. “A pleasant surprise to see someone conceive Golden Boat in such a different way.” For a song rooted in Tagore’s poetry and made by an artiste with no direct connection to this city, that response carries something. Art moves where it wants to.
For Arjun, What Remains belongs to a growing space where independent music films are becoming more than visual accompaniments. "It isn't a companion piece to Golden Boat," he says. "It's a response to it, a way of asking what a song like that feels like when it's lived rather than sung." Rather than centring the musician or illustrating the lyrics, he wanted the film to exist as a self-contained short story, with its own emotional rhythm and quiet revelations. "I'd place What Remains alongside a small but growing wave of Indian independent work that treats the music video less as promotion and more as its own short film."
The film is also, without announcing itself as such, a record of a particular Chennai. Bessy Arch, the old Museum Theatre at Egmore, certain stretches of beach that have not changed the way other parts of the city have. Arjun says he wanted to “hold a version of Chennai gently, not clinging to it, just acknowledging it was here, and it mattered.” There is something in that phrase that the film earns. It does not mourn the city. It just looks at it with attention.
Although the film never sets out to become an archive, it quietly ends up as one. Arjun says he wasn't interested in documenting Chennai like a historian, but certain places naturally demanded attention. "Once you set out to capture spots like Besant Nagar Beach, the Bessy Arch or the century-old Museum Theatre, you can't help but notice how much of this city is quietly holding its ground amid an ever-changing landscape." For him, those familiar landmarks carried the same emotional weight as the protagonist's keepsake. "I genuinely wanted to hold a version of Chennai gently, not clinging to it, just acknowledging it was here, and it mattered."
Amritha, who grew up in Chennai until the age of 10 before leaving, says the film has only deepened a relationship that began before she could properly articulate it. When asked what she hopes someone hears if they listen to Golden Boat while walking through the city, her answer does not name the song at all. “I hope they notice what their inner self tells them about everything around them, and make them confront many things, as well as find hope in many things.”
Perhaps that is also why the film feels so rooted in Chennai despite bringing together people and influences from elsewhere. Arjun points to the unlikely journey behind the project: an English song inspired by Rabindranath Tagore, written and performed by a Kerala-born artiste based in London, interpreted through a Chennai-set film starring an actor from Hyderabad. "Somehow it all comes together so beautifully, and no one questions it," he says. "I think that's the beauty of Chennai." To him, the city has always been a place where people arrive, grow into themselves and eventually begin to belong, regardless of where they started.
The bus was empty. The pink flower was already there in the beach creeper. The tide moved at the right time. Chennai kept offering things, and the film kept saying yes.
What Remains is streaming on YouTube, while Golden Boat is available on all major music platforms.
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