Yearning

A film crew arrives in Istanbul to make a documentary about the city for a minor TV channel. They start work, filming the many, very varied districts and denizens of Istanbul: an eccentric historian who believes that there was a civilization of cats before humanity, a Sufi dervish who has opened a café for lovers and mad people, an Armenian journalist, an Alevi communist and a philosophical tea lady…

One day in the cutting room, the director notices some shapes and figures in his footage which he had not seen on the actual day of filming: – it seems that his camera has picked up the presence of ghosts. This idea fascinates the director, and soon begins to obsess him. He films in the older neighbourhoods and at night in the hope of finding more ghosts. After a while, his crew abandons him to his obsession.

As the director passes through this journey from daylight to darkness, from the living city to the city of the past, many aspects of Istanbul life are touched upon: the destruction and renovation of old neighbourhoods, immigrant workers, resistance to the government, diverse religions and communities, the peculiarly melancholy essence of Istanbul.