Musician Alexander Hacke, best known as the bassist for Einstürzende Neubauten, carries a mobile recording rig across Istanbul, chasing the city's music from rooftop to basement to riverbank. Director Fatih Akin uses him as a guide rather than a narrator, letting the musicians themselves explain what the Bosphorus does to a sound that has to sit between Europe and Asia. The film moves through Kurdish folk singers, Roma brass bands, arabesque crooners, and the psychedelic Anatolian rock of Baba Zula and Erkin Koray, with Orhan Gencebay and Sezen Aksu turning up as living links to older styles. Street performances and club sets are filmed mostly as they happen, with minimal staging, so the city's noise, traffic, and calls to prayer bleed into the recordings. A stray quote from Confucius opens the film, setting up its real argument: that you can hear a country's politics and history in what its musicians choose to play. The performances carry the film more than any explanation does.