Most of us had that moment when we wished we could simply reboot our lives and start over, far from everyone and everything we knew, moving to a new town or country, changing our profession, meeting new people, and letting go of the old. In reality, second chances are rarely offered; thus, they must be seized, and this is what the main protagonist Reyhan (Defne Kayalar) of Melisa Önel’s drama “Suddenly” does.

Suddenly is screening at International Film Festival Rotterdam

The story centers around Reyhan who, because of her husband’s new job, has returned to Istanbul after living in Hamburg for more than twenty years. She is introduced during a magnetic resonance imaging scan in the opening scene, with her scared eyes looking straight into the camera, surrounded by the terrible whiteness of a medical room. When she afterwards gets presented with different olfactory probes at the nostrils,...