Medine, a widow in her 60s, lives with three of her grown-up children in Bitlis, a south-eastern town famous for its tobacco factory. The business of sharing her children’s joys and troubles within the same four walls has now begun to tire the ageing woman.
Medine’s eldest son, Şehsuvar, is an imam at one of the town’s mosques. Following the death of a little girl who has never had her photograph taken, he sets himself the task of finding a portrait that looks like her. Though his intention is to honour the girl’s memory, he can’t be sure of the consequences of his action. 
Sırrı, the middle son, works at the tobacco factory, but is fed up with the job and looking for an alternative. His dogged enquiries about a shop with its shutters always down lead him to a totally unexpected discovery.
Medine’s only daughter Meryem has been trying to get into university for years, but to no avail. Repeated failure has left her lugubrious and she flies off the handle at any reference in this direction, however oblique.
Harun, the youngest son and only child to have left home, sells bootleg CDs in Istanbul. Unnerved by the recent police crackdown on piracy in the big city, he packs up his entire stock of CDs and heads home to Bitlis.
But the town is hardly warm in its welcome: it’s as if the bus he boarded arrives in Bitlis at a time when life holds promise for no one. Süheyla, Harun’s first love, has just found out she can’t have children and been subjected to yet another beating by her husband. The plants in Medine’s home are as good as dead, but Süheyla revives them with her supply of the contraceptive pill...
Mixed in with the general hum that rises above the town’s ramshackle buildings is the odd proud utterance, easily distinguishable on closer listening. Yes, these are the announcements of a town council anxious to enlist the help of the public in catching an injured, runaway calf. Capture of the animal, which fled the abattoir seconds before slaughter, has become a matter of pride for the policemen following the trail of bloody.
In a town where television isn't watched much and newspapers have little currency, it is the young newsboys who provide the link with the outside world. Memorising the news and reciting it out loud in the teahouses is also a way for the boys to earn a few pennies. But casting a perpetual shadow cast over them is old Salman, a veteran of the job who just can’t seem to reconcile himself with retirement. The difference is that Salman’s news is 30 years old and no one even pretends to be interested.
While Şehsuvar the imam is hunting down a lookalike photo of the dead girl, he seems detached from all sense of reality. Pitched about like a spiritual leader unsure of his aim on the one hand, he’s also preoccupied with the restoration of the historical mosque where he ministers. When Zübeyir, the stonemason hired to do the repairs, finds a 500-year letter stuffed between the stones of the minaret, we chance on another character suffering from pride: the murdered architect of the mosque! Man’s pride is the sole reason for the cynical expression on Şehsuvar’s face. The bitter feeling that permeates every problem, the feeling we manage to blame indirectly for so many different outcomes...
As the imam once said himself: pride is the salt of life.