Mud, rain and bones pulled from the ground: these are the first images we see in Ufuk Emiroğlu’s Sevda, and they are ones that seem to haunt her title character. After her 2013 feature-length documentary My Father, the Revolution and Me, which premiered at Locarno, the Swiss-Turkish director makes her fiction feature debut with this film, which had its world premiere in the Feature Film Competition of the 2026 Zurich Film Festival. It was written by Emiroğlu and Ercan Kesal, who also plays a supporting role.

Sevda (Tülin Özen, whose grey-blue eyes convey much of the character’s intensity) is a hard-working – our first image of her is after she has slept at work – high-flying real-estate developer rapidly transforming Istanbul’s skyline into every other large, glass-windowed urban metropolis. (Both the actors and the sets in the film look amazing – at their aesthetic zenith, perhaps.) She maintains a secret relationship with her colleague Okan (Mert Firat), although they are afraid to disclose their relationship to their boss, Selim (played by Kesal).

On the professional front, Sevda is sent to pacify and buy out Ahmet (Macit Koper), an old cemetery caretaker who refuses to move from his home despite the neighbourhood having already been razed for high-rises. Sevda sees Ahmet as just another case to handle, but then the personal strand takes over: she long believed her father had abandoned his family after her mother was killed. However, she discovers the truth about him from his second partner, Elif (Süreyya Kilimci), with whom he – now elderly and comatose – lives in Switzerland.

Between the interests of neighbours, Sevda’s covert relationship and her meeting with Elif, Emiroğlu carefully introduces a number of small, breadcrumb-like mysteries. However, few are truly addressed, leaving the resolution feeling far too tidy and reliant on a simple chain of events, rather than a complex set of narrative threads. Frustratingly, the story of Ahmet is introduced early on and then largely forgotten about until the end, leaving the interlocking themes of cultural preservation, heritage and home by the wayside.

The film peaks at its most cinematographically adventurous, such as a number of hypnotic drone shots (cinematography by Florent Herry) showing the sprawling landscape of Istanbul as a sort of modern machine. These choices ultimately have more thematic strength than many of the movie’s main scenes, inspiring thoughts about Sevda’s contributions to the gentrification of the city, something she only sees as harmful later on.

Exposition-heavy sequences, such as an argument between Sevda and Okan regarding the death of her mother, thus become weighty without the necessary lead-up. Sevda brims with potential in its entanglement of the ethical, personal and political, but the film struggles to keep the threads robust enough for both conclusions – of Sevda’s personal and professional plights – to feel satisfying.

Sevda is a Swiss-Belgian-Turkish production by Akka Films in co-production with Stenola Productions, Bir Film and RTS - Radio Télévision Suisse.