A Tale of Three Sisters: The Story of Those Who Live Within Tragedy

The story is about three sisters who are sent to the town as “foster children” to escape poverty. After some time, they return to their village, and with their return, a story that has actually always been there - the story of not quite reaching what you want - begins again. Emin Alper’s award-winning film offers a social critique of people in the country who have learned to live with tragedies without letting them stop their daily lives.

The camera is set inside a vehicle, positioned to see the road through the windshield wipers. From inside the car, we travel through the village toward the home of the foster sisters. After the eldest sister, sent back with her baby, the middle sister also returns as the number of mistakes she made in town increases. The sisters meet again in the same house years later, and now, on the path back to town, they become rivals.

Emin Alper’s depiction of the village home works like a bus station metaphor, also reminding us of a cheap inn where the sisters, unable to reach their goals, are forced to spend the night. At this stop, we see their dreams, their plans, and watch their tragicomic moments and small pleasures.

In the film, we see the eldest sister, abandoned by the man she loves after finding out she is pregnant and married off to the village madman, losing her right to live in town; the middle sister, who pretends to be ill in order to get affection from her foster family; and the youngest sister, small but skilled, showing all her talents to those coming from town as a form of survival.

The director shows their emotional struggles in a gentle way, while also highlighting their hopeful and patient waiting. Meanwhile, the father, who distracts the daughters from their emotional hunger and tells them stories, is also deceived by the system. He is a complex character, like Aydın in Winter Sleep, familiar to audiences from different parts of the country, almost like someone whose presence feels known to us.

At the end of the film, the camera shows us the road out of the village from the back seat of the car, once again framed through the windshield wipers. Each character in the story could have their own feature-length film, making this production clearly one of the best Turkish films of recent years.