Sevda is a real estate developer driving Istanbul’s rapid gentrification. As she prepares to evict the keeper of an old Ottoman cemetery, her past resurfaces, forcing her to confront her story, and her city, from a new perspective.

Sevda wakes up in her office overlooking Istanbul, having worked all night on a property project. The city is decked out in its most beautiful colours, as if after a stormy night.
The life Sevda had dreamed of is within reach – a brilliant career, a villa (almost finished) and a devoted lover. But the past resists on all sides and stops her in her tracks. The old caretaker of the Ottoman cemetery she needs to demolish is not so easily dislodged. The construction of her project, a gigantic building complex, comes to a standstill and Sevda engages in a duel with the old man and his sons. She soon finds herself cornered on all sides and invaded by relics of the past, even in her dreams.
As Sevda gets bogged down in this battle between tradition and modernity, Elif (64), a Turkish immigrant living in Switzerland, tries to contact her. She wants to bring Sevda to see her father Nazim (65) at the hospital in La Chaux-de-Fonds where he lays in coma. Sevda, who has been brought up by her grandmother since her mother died and her father left, is totally unprepared to meet the man she has been mourning. But Elif is tough and determined to get Sevda back to Nazim.
Caught up in both the history of the city and her own history, confronted with uprooting, Sevda will have no choice but to face up to the past.