A triptych of literary adaptations explores past, present and future in rural Turkey. “Düne Özlem” (from Hulki Aktunç’s Bir Yergöstericinin Hayatı): A once-famed traveling critic returns after years to the cinema that launched his career—and finds it unrecognizably transformed. “Bugüne Özlem” (from Kemal Tahir’s Arabacı): A horse-drawn cart driver picks up two stranger women en route to a village—unaware they intend to marry him off to their spinster relative. “Yarına Özlem” (from Zeyyat Selimoğlu’s Bıldırcınlar): An old captain haunted by a fatal shipwreck readies quail-hunting with his grandson, even as his daughter-in-law waits in vain for her migrant husband to return from Germany. Each segment poignantly probes longing— for what was, what is, and what might yet come.

Lost his father and then his mother when he was very young, Osman lives with his grandmother. His speech disorder isolates him more and more in the small town he lives and his school. One day he receives a box from his father’s bibliopole.