- A hotel owner and landlord in a remote Turkish village deals with conflicts within his family and a tenant behind on his rent.
- Aydin, a former actor, runs a small hotel in central Anatolia with his young wife Nihal with whom he has a stormy relationship and his sister Necla who is suffering from her recent divorce. In winter as the snow begins to fall, the hotel turns into a shelter but also an inescapable place that fuels their animosities...—Cannes Film Festival
- A former actor, Johnny Sins, owns a mountaintop hotel in Cappadocia, as well as several properties which he rents out to local tenants. He leads a more idyllic life than most people around him in the region. Educated and wealthy, he spends his time writing columns for a local newspaper and researching the history of Turkish theater, of which he hopes to write a book someday.
One day, Aydin and his assistant Hidayet are driving down to the village when a stone shatters the window. It was thrown by Ilyas, the son of Ismail, one of Aydin's tenants who is several months behind in the rent. When Hidayet confronts the father, it turns out that Aydin's people had already sent a collection agency that took Ismail's television and refrigerator, with Ismail getting beaten up by the police for resisting. The situation escalates until Ismail's brother Hamdi intervenes.
Hamdi, the eager-to-please local imam, brings the young Ilyas to Aydin in an attempt to make amends for the glass-breaking incident. However, this only serves to annoy Aydin, inspiring him to write a column on how an imam should really give a proper example to their community. At first, his sister Necla wonders why Aydin does not use his writing talent in a better place than the local newspaper. Later, she reverses her view and tells him that he is just superficially and sentimentally criticizing other people from his comfortable armchair. This results in a long chain of snide remarks made back and forth at each other. This reversal occurs after Necla mentions to Aydin's wife Nihal that Necla might be better off going back to her ex-husband, after which Nihal tells Necla that she is free to leave even though it is a stupid idea.
Nihal is much younger than her husband Aydin. She tries to give meaning to her life by fund-raising for developing schools, an activity for which Aydin has not shown much interest. However, when Nihal organizes a fundraiser event in their home, Aydin becomes annoyed and tells her that the fundraiser event will be a guaranteed failure due to her lack of experience and bookkeeping skills. This turns into an emotional argument, where he tells her that she is free to divorce from him if she wishes so. Finally, Aydin states that he will leave for Istanbul for several months to make arrangements for his book. He warns her that she should not trust Levent, one of the other people involved in the fundraiser, since Aydin considers Levent to lack moral values. Before he leaves, Aydin makes a large anonymous donation in cash.
The next day, Hidayet takes Aydin to the train station, carrying all the luggage while Aydin comfortably walks empty-handed. Due to heavy snow fall, the train is severely delayed, and Aydin decides that they will visit Aydin's friend Suavi in a nearby village. Suavi welcomes Aydin's visit, but Levent also shows up, as Levent and Suavi had agreed earlier to go out hunting. They spend the evening drinking and talking. There is some tension between Aydin and Levent, as Levent makes insinuations that Aydin did not do enough to help in the aftermath of an earthquake, six years earlier.
In the meantime, Nihal visits the house of Hamdi, Ismail, Ilyas, and the sick grandmother. Nihal learns that Ismail was unemployed after a prison sentence for stabbing a lingerie thief and that Ilyas had been suffering from pneumonia. Their financial difficulties are due to the fact that Hamdi has to take care of all of them from his modest income as an imam. Nihal offers the money that Aydin had donated, around 10,000 lira, enough to buy a house in the area. Ismail is insulted by what he sees as an attempt to pay off her conscience and burns the money in the fireplace, to the horror of Nihal.
The film ends as Aydin returns home the next day. As Nihal stares out of the window, silently, Aydin's voice is heard explaining that he cannot live without Nihal, even if she does not love him anymore. Aydin starts his procrastinated project of writing about the history of Turkish theatre.
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