Pandora’s Box is a story of alienation and isolation. It is a story of individuals whose lives have been shaped by a sterile, middle-class morality, a kind of human landscape, both universal and singular at the same time. The film is concerned with the curse of modernity. As simple lives begin to give way to the hum and glamour of an industrialized, globalized lifestyle, a Pandora’s box inevitably opens. Ustaoglu tells the story of an estranged family – two sisters, Nesrin and Guezin, and a brother, Mehmet – who live their comfortable, preoccupied lives in Istanbul. When the siblings find out that their elderly mother, Nusret, has gone missing, they return to their small coastal hometown to find her. As the group journeys trough the countryside, they realize that they are strangers in their own land – as ignorant to the ancient Turkish countryside as they are to each other. Most of all, however, they have become alienated from themselves, their dreams distracted by prejudice, nihilism and lazy concessions to the status quo. What starts out as a begrudging trip to find their mother turns into a voyage of self-discovery for the threesome, a poetic reordering of their psyches as the reality of the world around them is reflected back onto themselves.