Elif and her sisters Funda and Aysun have spent much of their adult life coming to terms with a traumatic childhood in which their parents were killed during a bus accident that left the siblings terrified but physically unhurt. In time Funda and Aysun became mentally ill, and it fell to Elif to care for them, but eventually the burden became more than Elif and her husband could bear, and they deserted the siblings, leaving them to an unknown fate. Living in a country with no social safety net, Funda and Aysun fall prey to violence and exploitation, and their reunion with Elif and Yasemin is both poignant and troubling. Yasam Arsizi (aka Sidewalk Sisters) was an official selection at the 2008 Istanbul Film Festival.
The movie is about the troubles of a group of people living in the same neighborhood. Ihsan has turned in upon himself by the death of his lover and he is waiting for the day when he will die in the mansion where he lives. Fatma sometimes goes to help Ihsan, and she can’t stand against her husband who abuses her daughter. Gulizar lives in the same neighborhood, and she has also become obsessed with her virginity. Gül is also accidentally pregnant and cheated on by her husband. She is also preoccupied with her own problems. The story of these five people struggling with their own problems will intersect around a murder case.
In this deeply symbolic and visually lush film, as far as Tashbash is concerned, he's just a malcontent, a fairly ordinary hell-raiser who has gotten into trouble with the law in the past. Sure, he hates the village headman who is a toady to the region's oppressive landlord, and he dislikes the fact that everyone looks to the headman for help because they have no place else to turn, but he's just an ordinary guy and has no solutions for his fellow villagers. However, after one of them has a vision in which Tashbash is shown to be a manifestation of one of their more important local saints, the villagers unite as one in seeking him out for help with the upcoming visit of the landlord to collect rents which they can't pay. Their adulation and reverence is so persistent that eventually even Tashbash becomes a believer.