The story is based on one of the well-known Turkish novels. Ali Riza and his wife Hayriye, living in a small town, raise five children together in an atmosphere of strict morality and mutual respect. But one day the family decides to move to Istanbul so that their middle daughter can continue her education at one of Istanbul's universities. They do not even suspect what changes and trials await them in this vast city. While the novel's protagonists try to adjust to the changing life of the social order, the chasm toward which they rush with feverish speed, the generation gap, the growing loss of moral values, and, in the end, the ruin of the family. Ali Riza, forced to watch as his children, one after another, drift away from him, from moral and social values, disappear, likens them to leaves breaking off from the branches of a tree in late autumn.