Yozgat Blues

2013 • 96 minutes

About this movie

Yavuz (58) sings popular songs from the ’70s, but his career is fast declining: he’s now reduced to irregular ‘performances’ in a shopping mall with an inferior sound system. Beyond this, he teaches music on free courses offered by the local municipality. His wife’s death has left him a complete loner and he has had no other relationships since. Neşe (30) is one of Yavuz’s students from the municipality courses and has a job doing sausage promotions at supermarket stands. She has a good voice and a genuine interest in music, but is condemned by her poor background to earning a living through menial work. Yavuz approaches the manager of the shopping mall with a request for more regular and frequent singing work. Although the answer is negative, he learns that a club is looking for a live band and leaves the manager with a phone number. The club turns out to be in Yozgat, a town off the beaten track despite being in the middle of Turkey, and the vacancy is for a male-female duo. Yavuz puts it to Neşe that they go together. Neşe accepts, having nothing in her life that she can’t walk away from. Yavuz and Neşe set off for Yozgat, leaving behind the hopelessness of their lives at home. But how will their new and unlikely partnership fare? What will they meet with in this provincial town neither has seen before? The two of them begin performing at the Yozgat club. The owner has decided to revamp the club’s fusty image, bringing singers from Istanbul to create a more with-it feel. The project has also involved making certain physical changes to the place. Neşe’s presence and manner act as a reminder to Yavuz of a woman’s warmth, and he’s aware of beginning to feel some excitement in his life again. Arriving in the provincial town, he begins to respond, albeit in a muted way, to the young woman’s attentions. Before long, Yavuz and Neşe meet Sabri (30), a barber living in Yozgat. Sabri has two ambitions in life: to get married and to open his own barber’s shop. But repeated rejections by the girls he sees have plunged him into a state of despair. A friendship begins to develop between Neşe and Sabri. The realization throws Yavuz into a state of inward anxiety. Meanwhile, Neşe and Sabri grow closer by the day. But what really complicates things is when the owner of the club says that because business is bad they can only perform once a week; on top of that, he won’t be able to pay them for the time being.