A film about migration, otherness, and the possibility of coexistence.

Aksaray is a district on Istanbul’s historic peninsula. Today, it has become a vital crossroads for people fleeing war, poverty, and erasure. Traces of a vast geography stretching from Syria to Somalia and from East Turkestan to Kazakhstan intermingle in its streets. An Ethiopian hairdresser stands beside a Damascene restaurant; a Kazakh eatery sits adjacent to a Gazan falafel shop. A courier from the Turkish city of Urfa competes with his Somali counterpart, while Yemenis and Uyghurs become neighboring shopkeepers.

The symbol of this transformation in Aksaray is Yeni Han, which serves as a hub where refugees seek solutions. Here, people look for ways to reunite families separated by war. Asylum applications, court petitions, school enrollments, work permits, residence permits… As documents are translated, lives are transformed along with the space itself. For some, it is an unsettling place, generating problems even as it offers solutions. In short, Yeni Han is filled with moments in which the official and the unofficial rapidly trade places.

Alongside all this, an invisible distance persists between refugees and locals living on the same street and in the same building. They are physically close, yet remain entirely without contact. It is a silence woven sometimes from fear, sometimes from prejudice—filled with opinions formed without knowledge and assumptions made without ever truly meeting.