“A few years after my death, she has started to write a novel about me. She was looking at my photos for hours and trying to translate my silence into her language. But it was not working. Places and faces blended into each other, changed, alternated. Then and now, here and there. Everything, side by side. Hoping to unravel the clutter, to be able to write, she decided to come here. To Damal, my home, which I loved and the place of her childhood… She was observing the village with my eyes and saw me in the faces of the strangers. She was trying to remember the very day, when everything has started.”

In a small Turkish mountain village, Hülya returns from Germany to write a novel about her deceased father. While she observes, she does not always get an equally positive picture of her father and the dramatic events that shaped his life and hers. Confusing memories fall into place. At the same time, present and past, reality and fantasy start mingling increasingly. Nature, idyllically one time and mercilessly next, forms the atmospheric decor for this reflection on the value of family bonds, love, and honor.

Ayşe Polat is an internationally acclaimed film director, screenplay writer, and film producer. Polat was born in Malatya in Turkey and has lived in Germany since she was eight. She studied German, philosophy and cultural science in Berlin and Bremen and while she was studying, made films as an autodidact. She started her career in the 1990s with a series of successful short films.

Her first feature film, Auslandstournee, was released in 1999. The film was shown at festivals in Karlsbad and Tokio, and was awarded the Young Director’s Talent Prize in Ankara. Her second film, En Garde (2004), opened the Locarno International Film Festival and was awarded Best Film and Best Actress. For some of her films – as Luks Glück (2010), Die Erbin (2013), and the documentary The Others (2015) – she also functioned as co-producer.

In 2006, Polat also staged her first play Otobüs at the Berlin theatre Hebbel am Ufer.