Shirin is a young woman from a village in Turkey, where everybody in the village works for (and more or less belongs to ) a rich landowner. She was promised in marriage to Mahmut, when she was a little girl and is rather looking forward to her marriage, once Mahmut comes back from Germany, where he has gone to work. When Shirin's father is arrested for opposing the landowner, she has to go and live with one of her married brothers.The estate manager asks her brothers for her hand. The brothers agree, to get her off their hands and also because it is always nice, to be on good terms with the manager.
Mahmut comes for a visit at one time, bringing lots of presents from Germany, but hardly seems to notice Shirin, all she gets is a plastic bowl and he certainly doesn't insist on his fiance. Shirin can't stand the landowner and runs away and in order to go looking for Mahmut in Germany. On the bus to Istambul, she meets nice people who she can live with until all the red tape has been dealt with and she can finally board a plane to Germany.
In order to get to Germany , she had to get a contract to work in a factory in Koeln (Cologne). She lives in a hostel with other women and has a hard time trying to get used to a completely different way of life and a different standards of proper behaviour. On her free days, she goes into the city in order to look for Mahmut. On one of these occasions, she ends up in a bar, because she is told in a nice Cologne accent by man passing by (Jürgen, I'll call him that, because he doesn't seem to have a name in the film), that Mahmut is there. It turns out to be a different Mahmut, but Jürgen is very nice to her, invites her and shows her some more of the West German (low-)lifestyle, which only makes her throw up.
She stays in Germany for quite a while but times start to get difficult: there are fewer jobs available and lots of Turkish workers have to go back home. Shirin also loses her job in the factory, she works for a while cleaning offices and stays with a Greek family. One evening, while cleaning, she gets raped and when she then tries to find another job again, she can't find one. The Greek family, she stayed with also goes home again. Shirin still doesn't want to go home and finally gets the address of a pub in the old part of the city, where they are looking for a cleaner. The young man running the pub would have taken her but his mother doesn't trust foreigners and refuses to take her. When Shirin leaves the pub in dispair, she meets Jürgen again. He is obviously some kind of low-life, somewhat the worse for wear after a hard night. But he is friendly, he invites her for breakfast in the pub and promises to get her work and the necessary papers to stay in Germany.
We soon find out, what kind of work: He takes her along to his cronies. Shirin realizes, that she has ended up in bad company but shows no resistance, she seems to be past caring. Nevertheless, in order to scare her even more and make sure, that she obeys, the men hurt her with a burning cigarette, to make it absolutely clear, that they don't even need a reason to be nasty. Jürgen seems to be the most tenderhearted of the lot, he leaves the room because he can't stand watching when they mistreat women. They all turn out to be a group of pimps, who sell their girls to foreign workmen living in hostels without their wives. Shirin has to join the other women and gets smuggled into hostels at night.
In one of these nights, Jürgen has a quarrel with some of the other pimps, he gets stabbed and Shirin is the one, who stays with him when he dies. His last words are, that she is a great girl. The other pimps take over the group of girls but at last Shirin tries to run away. She gets shot by the pimps, because she was a witness to the murder.