Saturday, April 6, 2024 | 2:00pm
Dir. Melisa Önel
East Coast Premiere
DIRECTOR PRESENT
Q&A following film screening
Featuring Defne Kayalar, Öner Erkan, Şerif Erol, Ayşenil Şamlıoğlu, Dilan Çiçek Deniz, Aysel Yıldırım
115 min. / 2022
Remis Auditorium
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
After decades of living in Hamburg, Reyhan returns to Istanbul with her husband for a short time. On the eve of setting back, Reyhan realizes that she has lost her sense of smell. When a doctor’s appointment leaves her anxious about the possibility of a serious illness, instead of undergoing more tests she decides to follow her own instincts to regain her sense of smell. One morning she vanishes, she secretly moves into her late grandmother’s flat, gets a random job at a hotel, meets a blind man. As she ventures away from the life prescribed to her chasing after scents, she goes back to the origins of her biggest wounds; to a fisherman’s coast where her childhood has passed and to a woman called Leman with whom guilt and desire are meshed together. Just as assuming a new life seems easy and plausible, she realizes that she has become a missing person. She considers; is this her chance for freedom?
From the Director
"Feride Çiçekoğlu and I came together for the third time in writing a script. We felt strongly about our character becoming a missing person both a form of transgression and a way to question agency and womanhood. As we worked on the script we tackled issues of what is considered to be ‘permissible’ in terms of female desire… What it means to be a woman, to be selfish, to desire and walk in the streets… A voyeur and flaneuse, does it give a chance to redefine our character; Reyhan… does it give a chance for freedom?"