Toz bezi

Nesrin and Hatun are cleaning ladies in Istanbul. They are friends, neighbours and Kurds. Nesrin has kicked her husband out. It was only intended as a warning, but now he hasn’t returned, and Nesrin and her young daughter Asmin find themselves in increasingly difficult circumstances. To enjoy proper social benefits, Nesrin would need to find a real job. Hatun, on the other hand, dreams the dream of moving up in the world and of a life in the fashionable district of Moda, where she cleans the apartments of her middle-class clients. Her desire is so strong that she, a Muslim, even prays for it in a Christian church.
Toz bezi is a sensitive, thoroughly unsentimental portrait of a friendship between two women. But beyond the personal story of their relationship and its conflicts, Ahu Öztürk also paints a picture of an entire society in which social and ethnic origins can be insurmountable obstacles. She shows this almost in passing, in the scenes of Hatun and Nesrin at their clients’ homes. And when the camera follows the two of them moving between Istanbul’s different worlds, it becomes clear that the distance they are traversing is not just geographical.