Egg (Yumurta)

Semih Kaplanoğlu directed Yumurta (Egg) in 2007, a 93-minute drama and Turkish-Greek co-production. It opens the Yusuf Trilogy, which follows the poet Yusuf through three stages of life, though the films were made and released in reverse order: Egg shows him in later adulthood, while the closing chapter, Honey, returns to his childhood, with Milk between them. It played in the Directors' Fortnight at the 60th Cannes Film Festival and reached Turkish cinemas on November 9, 2007.

Yusuf left his small hometown for Istanbul fifteen years earlier. Caught between city and provinces and in an identity crisis, he has written a book of poems that nobody but himself cares about. News of a death sends him home to bury his mother, and there he finds far more than he went looking for. Nejat İşler plays Yusuf and Saadet Işıl Aksoy takes the other leading part, with Ufuk Bayraktar, Cengiz Bozkurt, Tülin Özen and Gülçin Santırcıoğlu.

Kaplanoğlu wrote the screenplay with Orçun Köksal for Kaplan Film Production and Inkas Film Production, shooting the hometown scenes in Tire, İzmir. Turkish critics placed it in the line of minimalist, philosophical small-town films begun by Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Kasaba and Mayıs Sıkıntısı and continued by Reha Erdem's Beş Vakit.