Esir Şehrin İnsanları

Murat goes to another city with his five sons to escape the blood feud. but his eldest son falls for an impossible love.

After the release, Iki Gemi Yanyana (Two Ships Side by Side) stirred controversy over its treatment of lesbians, showing two women kissing each other on the lips (later, in Dul BirKadın (A Widow), director Atıf Yılmaz took up the same theme again). This scene creates a moment of interest in this otherwise conventional film.

1926, Turkey. Anatolia is undergoing a difficult and harsh process marked by turmoil and uncertainty. Alongside the decisive and conscious directives to establish the new infrastructure of the new Turkey, there are also examples of resistance that cause an unstoppable reaction and unhealed wounds. Amidst the political backdrop revealed by this process, which operates with the indifference of a broken clock, individual stories continue to unfold with all their human qualities, and personal conflicts persist in highlighting negativity.

The role played by the regular army in the Turkish War of Independence. This film's footage was burned by the military junta in 1983.

Murat is a charismatic political prisoner in Malatya. He is well respected by both inmates and prison officers. There he meets two women: Tozey, a famous prostitute, and Hanim, a defenseless woman accused of murdering her husband.

Sadık Pasha is a pleasure-loving and pious pasha who lives in a luxurious Ottoman mansion with his three wives. The balance of the mansion, already full of intrigue with three women, is completely disrupted when he wants to take a fourth wife, thinking that he needs to continue his lineage because he has no children.

A triptych of literary adaptations explores past, present and future in rural Turkey. “Düne Özlem” (from Hulki Aktunç’s Bir Yergöstericinin Hayatı): A once-famed traveling critic returns after years to the cinema that launched his career—and finds it unrecognizably transformed. “Bugüne Özlem” (from Kemal Tahir’s Arabacı): A horse-drawn cart driver picks up two stranger women en route to a village—unaware they intend to marry him off to their spinster relative. “Yarına Özlem” (from Zeyyat Selimoğlu’s Bıldırcınlar): An old captain haunted by a fatal shipwreck readies quail-hunting with his grandson, even as his daughter-in-law waits in vain for her migrant husband to return from Germany. Each segment poignantly probes longing— for what was, what is, and what might yet come.

When water is poured onto the cotton field, Musa, whose crop is ruined, cannot pay his debt. He has only one option to save his field from the loan shark: to work at Captain Tayfur's sand quarry. He leaves his wife in the village and starts working with a group of workers whose lives are as painful as his own.