Films

Sayara is a young woman from Turkmenistan who works as a cleaner in a gym in Istanbul. When her older sister, Yonca, is brutally murdered by a group of friends of Barış, the gym owner with whom Yonca is having an extramarital affair, and they are released due to “lack of evidence”, Sayara decides to take justice into her own hands. The only thing these men couldn’t predict was that neither their country’s (misogynistic) judicial and penal system, nor anyone else, could save them from a sambo fighter trained to be lethal. At a time when the number of femicides and perpetrators who go unpunished continues to rise in countries like Türkiye and Portugal, the Turkish director creates “Sayara”, a gory and destructive response to the gender violence that threatens women’s lives every day. This film, which was one of the first titles in Room Service to be announced, marks the return of the director to MOTELX.