Avis des critiques

For all of its big ideas, which Özge deploys with remarkable grace, it’s the film’s small moments that linger. [...] Like cities and bridges, people who graze but never grasp their private dreams abound; capturing their lives with vision and compassion is a feat.

If director Asli Özge has said something about modern-day Istanbul, she’s done it in fairly broad strokes that may be too far apart for the sake of a discernible narrative; if she’s captured a worthwhile social portrait of a metropolis’s underclass, it’s in small moments of desperation and vulnerability, and, perhaps, her loose narrative strands that suggest the characters’ larger isolation.

Ozge shows remarkable control for a first-time feature director, particularly with such delicate material. The characters are appropriately natural but never come across as amateurs. The film seems more like a careful and successful construction than an experiment.

Shot with the good intention of giving a realistic profile of ordinary people and their ordinary lives with their difficulties and small dreams, this film would have been better if it could have reflected the lives of these characters through a more developed aesthetic perception and a philosophical insight into the stories of the ‘storylessness’ of their lives.