When Ayshe´s older sister dies, she refuses to be with the other villager and starts searching for her younger brother in Greece.
The character of Ayshe was born Eleni, daughter of indigenous Greeks in the eastern Black Sea region of Northern Turkey, what was once the ancient country of Pontus.
The movie has many commonalities with a series of movies by the renowned filmmaker Theodoros Angelopoulos: the borders and their impact on the lives of human beings – as in The Suspended Step of the Stork; a tedious Odyssean search for a family member – as in Landscape in the Mist; the long-lost identity and the fusion of different cultures – as in Ulysses' Gaze and The Suspended Step of the Stork.
The similarities are not limited to the content and themes; they also include the form and style of the movie: carefully composed scenes and an enormous number of extended long shots.
She belongs to a generation which has gone through the ordeal of Population exchange between Greece and Turkey, and has never managed to fully recover from that emotional wound.