Shirin, a young Turkish giri, escapes from an arranged marriage and travels to West Germany, where she searches Cologne for Mahumet, the man she had hoped to marry. He has come to Germany from Turkey as a •guest-worker'. Shirin finds work in a factory, but loses her job when foreign workers are no longer needed. She also loses her only friend who returns to Greece after the fall of the Junta.

Trying to adjust to her hostile surroundings, she dyes her hair, learns German and obtains a job as a cleaner, but is brutally raped one night. Slowly, she drifts into prostitution, and it is in this degraded state that she meets Mahumet, for whose sake she came to Germany.

Brian Baxter has said of the film, 'few movies have so sympathetically and systematically chartered the decline and fall of a human being, nor as accurately related them to the responsible society'.