Samet, a teacher at a state school in a remote province, is very candidly bored with everything and longs for a posting to Istanbul. He has a favourite pupil: Sevim, a 14-year-old with whom he exchanges flirtatious banter and sometimes puts his arm round her shoulders. When a love letter addressed to Samet is found in Sevim’s exercise book by a member of staff, Samet is coldly embarrassed: his warm affection for her is replaced by a wary sense that this is going to get him into trouble. He almost loses his hopes of escaping the grim life he seems to be stuck in. Will his encounter with Nuray, herself a teacher, help him overcome his angst?
"What has driven me to form a narrative through the experiences of an art teacher in the midst of his compulsory service in Turkey’s Eastern Anatolian region was mainly the idea that such a subject could present a rich motley of situations and events that could provide room for discussions on basic concepts that, in our country, continuously confront us as the principal dichotomies, like good versus evil, and individualism versus collectivism." (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)