Serenata para Nadia

Istanbul, 2001. Maya Duran is a single mother struggling to balance a demanding job at Istanbul University with the challenges of raising a teenage son. Her worries are heightened when she is placed in the care of the enigmatic Maximilian Wagner, an elderly German-born Harvard professor who is visiting town to give a lecture at the university. However, as the days go by, Maya notices that something strange is happening with the professor. Why do the Turkish, British, Russian secret services follow them during their walks through the city? Why does the professor insist that Maya take him to a remote beach north of Istanbul? Why once there, despite the icy February wind, does the old professor risk his life to play a serenade with his violin in front of an inclement sea? Though distant at first, Maya learns of the tragic circumstances that brought Professor Wagner to Istanbul sixty years earlier, and the dark realities that continue to haunt him. Inspired by the Struma catastrophe in 1942, in which the nearly eight hundred Jewish refugees fleeing from the Nazis en route to Palestine perished when abandoned off the Turkish coast, Serenade for Nadia is both a moving story of love as a gripping testament to the power of human connection in extreme situations.