Mommy, I'm Scared

Ali has an accident and loses his memory; he can no longer tell who he is from what the people around him tell him he is. His neighbours in an Istanbul apartment building fill that gap with their own stories. A valuable ring passing from hand to hand, an old theft and a fabricated police investigation come into it, and the whole neighbourhood gets tangled together. Reha Erdem builds the film not as a drama of memory but as a group portrait of how many different states a human body and mind can be in. Every flat in the building is a separate condition: illness, fear, obsession, old age. Rather than one plot, the narrative moves by these touching each other. It is counted among the turning points in Erdem's own filmography, with the humour and the unease sitting in the same scene.