Dreamy housekeeper Aliye spends her days between hotel rooms, escaping into the lives of the guests. But after a brief encounter with a famous filmmaker, Aliye decides that she has a story to tell, leading to an entanglement of lives and fictions.
Aliye is a fan-girl of the renowned filmmaker Levent, who has arrived at the hotel she works at as the honorary guest of the Söke Film Festival. At first, as locals inundate the filmmaker with their sorrows and heartbreaks, hoping for a chance to immortalise themselves on the big screen, she quietly watches him from afar. But before long Aliye has pulled Levent into the murky waters of the past.
In this tender drama, the two strangers spur one another’s imaginations to give shape to their life stories. With a keen eye for the unusuality found in the friendships strangers strike, Pelin Esmer (Watchtower, 2012) returns to IFFR. Working across documentary and fiction, she distils our human relationships to ‘storytellers’ and ‘listeners’ who, inescapably, transform one another.
If we’re bound to fade as actualities and all that remains of us is a story, Aliye dares to tell it in her own words.
– Reman Sadani
> Country of production: Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania