Winner, Best Screenplay, 2015
Nesrin is a young, urban middle class woman in modern day Istanbul who decides to abandon her city life to recover from her recent divorce. With plans to realise her childhood dream of becoming a writer, she retreats to the house of her deceased grandmother in a remote village to finish a novel. Nesrin’s idyllic plans are disrupted when her conservative and increasingly unhinged mother arrives uninvited and refuses to leave. Nesrin’s writing stalls and she finds her mother’s conservative and traditional village ways suffocating and they are forced to confront the darker corners of each other’s inner worlds. Mother and daughter and their troubled relationship provide a complex portrait of humanity’s struggle between modernity and conservatism.