Closing night! Post-screening Q&A with director Ozcan Alper!

Sumru, an ethnomusicologist, leaves her university in Istanbul and sets off for Diyarbakır in southeast Turkey, where she plans to record the elegies of those (mainly women) who have lost loved ones in the ongoing Turkish-Kurdish conflict. Yet the journey has another purpose, even if Sumru can’t admit it to herself: to find the man she herself loved and “lost.” Along the way she meets Ahmet, also wounded by the war, a street vendor who sells bootleg DVDs.  Each comes to recognize the ongoing grief in the other, and as they probe their respective wounds they provide an outline of the great wound that continues to bleed the nation. Özcan Alper, whose Autumn made such a strong impression at the 2009 edition of New Directors/New Films, returns with this emotional, revealing road movie that tracks the emotional costs of the many years of an undeclared war.