The film serves as both a specific story about Turkey and also as a broader allegory for challenges faced by young women around the world. In the film, five orphaned sisters live with their uncle and grandmother in a village on the Black Sea. After they are wrongly reported for inappropriate behavior while playing with some boys on a beach, they are made prisoners in their own home, with severe restrictions over what they wear, where they go and what they do. Individually and together, the girls struggle for independence and their own identities, trying to do nothing more than just be themselves.
“Even if it seems like it’s telling a story from a little village in Turkey, it’s actually a universal issue,” said actress Elit Iscan, 22. “I think every woman is facing some kind of inequality in her life, whether once or many times, so I think everyone is finding something from their lives.”