El Yazısı follows three stories on a day when the town is welcoming its very first foreign English teacher. As an accidental tourist is mistaken for her, the wind of change starts to blow.

Iris, a recently sober alcoholic, is due in court tomorrow: rested and prepared. Unable to fall asleep, she battles the voices in her head and her own desire for a drink as the night stretches on, seemingly without end.

While vacationing at a remote cabin, a young girl and her two fathers are taken hostage by four armed strangers who demand that the family make an unthinkable choice to avert the apocalypse. With limited access to the outside world, the family must decide what they believe before all is lost.

Two estranged half-sisters form a complicated bond as they work together to retrieve their rare and precious inheritance, which their late father inexplicably leaves to the mysterious Marco.

Herman and Marie, a couple in their fifties, arrive in Istanbul to pick up the luggage of their deceased son. In his backpack. Herman discovers a logbook of their son's trip through Turkey. Herman decides to reconstruct his son's last journey, to see what he has seen. He drags along his wife into a, what he believes to be, cathartic venture.

Claire Smythson, wife of the renowned abstract artist Richard Smythson, is plunged into a late-life crisis when her husband is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and is in danger of not completing the paintings for his final show.