- Mustafa and his wife, who're both laborers are married for 5 years. The couple has nothing to do with politics and spend their days happily with their 3 year old daughter and their TV, despite the clamor of guns clashing outside every night.
- September 1980 in an Istanbul ghetto will prove to be the most inappropriate point in time and space for Mustafa Memet Ali Alabora, a textile worker, and his wife Esma Sibel Kekilli, another labourer, to prefer honouring their installment plan of a TV set rather than considering their pending rents.
On the foreground of the civil war between the rightists and the leftists of the era, the apolitical couple leads an unnoticeable life. Both the young man and the younger woman along with their little daughter are contented characters, and apart from Mustafa wanting their ideal copulation frequency should be higher than the current value while Esma disagreeing, there is not a bit of conflict among them. So happily married that, they would not even hear about that infamous coup d'état until Mustafa goes out to buy bread and is forced back home by a streetful of soldiers, one Sunday. The whole country is shaken and irreversibly changed but this may not bother them much anyway, if Mustafa would not slam the door shut once again when his landlord appears begging for the rent. No one even had the ghost of a chance to avoid an arrest if reported to be a communist by an informant then, and perhaps what Mustafa did not know was that, this was the favourite methodology of the elderly landlords to employ against their broke and stubborn young tenants.
Mustafa is brutally arrested one midnight upon obviously false information and is dragged to the police station. The 22 days of his custody turns out to be a documentary of Turkish torture techniques of 1980s. The simple story is that, there exists an "anarchist" code-named Sehmuz, and the police are told Mustafa is Sehmuz. So, this is the reason Mustafa is there and there seems to be no way out. Mustafa consistently denies all allegations but he is tortured with a gradually increasing degree for he is lying. He tries accepting all allegations and he is tortured for lying about the details. The truth is he has no idea even about the subject matter and he just tries to survive. In the cell he is creeping and sleeping during the torture breaks, he befriends with a fellow victim code named professor, who later dies under excessive torture. One day Professor tells Mustafa his home address when he realises he is about to die soon, so that Mustafa will tell his family he died there.
Mustafa will finally be released, only thanks to the killing of actual Sehmuz by the police during a gun fight. So the torture ends, the police semi-apologetically more threateningly release him, and the detainee returns home - the event that names the film - to see he has no home anymore.
He rings the door bell of his Korea veteran communist-hater father-in-laws apartment that night, into which his wife Esma and his daughter already moved. He is less than welcomed by the father-in-law and Esma tells him soon she was fired. When he goes to the factory the next day, he understands he was also fired. He starts wandering around, accompanied with hallucinations and haunting scenes from the custody days. He cannot help the reverberating sound Sehmuz following him everywhere: the way the police chief used to address him a zillion times a day.
Mustafa soon reads in the papers that "Professor has died during a gun fight with the security forces." He more than once intends to visit the address Professor gave to him to let his family know the reality. The visits in his mind only result in hypothetical arrests for being there and the real visit ends up with not daring knock the door and running away. When one day he eventually goes there and knocks the door, the door does not open and he turns back while struggling with the same Sehmuz sound in his mind. However, this voice turns out to be real especially when he is at a location he is not supposed to be. The same police team in a nearby van approaches Mustafa to say not to be around once again. "I'll put you in jail and you'll be gone, ok?" the police chief says, "and this time the landlord doesn't need to report you." Then they go to Professors family to tell that Professor has been killed during a gun fight.
The ending takes place in the usual coffee house Mustafa used to frequent where he coincides with his former landlord and has a tea with him keeping his mouth shut while the landlord talks. His friends around a neighbouring table start to quietly discuss among themselves whether such arrests happen to only the ones who have something to do with communism or not. The police enter. The person saying the arrests are never arbitrary is arrested together with another fellow upon "looking like the wanted" cause.
The balance sheet of the junta years flows: Executions, reported suicides, deaths: under torture, during fights, hunger strikes, in prison and lots of other related facts.
Written by: Armagan TEKDONER
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