Lale, the youngest of five sisters, bids farewell at school to her teacher, who is moving to Istanbul. The sisters decide to walk home instead of taking a van. Along the way, they play a game of "chicken fight" at the beach with their male classmates. At home, their grandmother hits them for having bodily contact with boys and thus "pleasuring themselves" with them. Their uncle Erol is equally furious. From then on, the girls are forbidden from leaving the house. They feel stifled as their grandmother tries to make them suitable for marriage. When in public, they must now dress in drab, conservative clothing. Instead of attending school, they must stay home and learn how to cook, clean, and sew from their female relatives. Even so, the oldest sister, Sonay, sneaks out occasionally to meet her lover. Lale, who loves football, is forbidden from attending Trabzonspor matches. She resolves to go to a match from which men have been banned due to hooliganism. She learns that the girls in the village are going together on a bus. The sisters, who are happy for an opportunity to leave the house, sneak out with Lale. After missing the bus, they hitch a ride with a passing truck driver, Yasin, who helps them catch up to it. They are ecstatic in the atmosphere of the all-female crowd cheering for their team. Back home, their aunt sees them at the match on TV just as their uncle and other village men are about to tune in. To prevent them from finding out, she cuts the house's and then the whole village's electricity. When the girls return, their grandmother decides to start marrying the sisters off in order to get them settled. They are taken to town, ostensibly "to get lemonade," to show them off to potential suitors. Soon enough, a suitor appears. Sonay vows to marry only her lover and refuses to meet the prospective suitor and his family. Selma is sent instead and becomes engaged. Sonay gets engaged a short while later to her lover. At the two sisters' joint wedding, Sonay is happy while Selma is not. On the night of her wedding, Selma's in-laws come to view the bedsheets in a traditional ritual to establish that Selma was a virgin before her wedding night. Because there is no blood on the sheet, her in-laws take her to a physician to have her virginity tested. Next in line for marriage is Ece, who is being sexually abused at night by her uncle, Erol. When the three remaining girls stop with Erol near a bank, Ece allows a boy to have sexual contact with her in the car. She makes jokes at the lunch table, causing loud laughs from her sisters, and is told to go to her room. There, she commits suicide. Her whole family attends the funeral. The two youngest sisters, Nur and Lale, remain trapped in their home. Lale continues to sneak out. On one attempt to walk to Istanbul alone, she encounters Yasin, the truck driver, who is kind to her. At Lale's request, he teaches her how to drive. When she is caught on the way back into the house, her family reinforces their efforts to make it impossible for the girls to leave. Erol starts abusing Nur in place of Ece, and her grandmother knows about it. She says that now it is time for Nur to be married off. Despite being young, she is found a suitor and engaged to be married. On the night of the ceremony, Lale convinces her to resist, and the girls bar themselves inside the house while the wedding party is outside, much to the embarrassment of their family. As the party disperses, Erol tries to get inside. Lale finds a phone hidden in a cupboard and plugs it in to call Yasin for help. The girls gather up money and a few supplies, grab the uncle's car keys, and sneak out of the house. They manage to escape but crash the car close to their house. Yasin later picks them up and takes them to a bus station. The girls take the bus to Istanbul and find their former teacher, who greets them warmly.