Sumru (28) is doing music research at a university in Istanbul. To work on her thesis on gathering and recording an exhaustive collection of Anatolian elegies, she sets off for the southeast of the country for a few months. The brief trip turns out to be the longest journey of her life. In the course of the trip, Sumru crosses paths with Ahmet, a young guy who sells bootleg DVDs on the streets of Diyarbakır, with Antranik, the aging and solitary warden of a crumbling church in the city, and with various characters who witness the ongoing "unnamed war".
During her three-month stay in Diyarbakır, while she is looking for the stories of the elegies, she finds herself having to confront an agony from her own past, which she has buried until now. When they set off for an evacuated mountain village in Hakkari, she does not respond to Ahmet’s question about why they are taking such a dangerous journey: "Why this village especially, what is there?"