According to director Bülent Boral, The Man Talking to Stones is the story of the change/transformation of Mehmet Kuşman. An 80-year-old guard at Van’s Çavuştepe Castle, Kuşman taught himself Urartian, an ancient language belonging to the kingdom of Urartu, which at its height spread over parts of today’s Turkey, Armenia and Iran. Kuşman is now one of only a handful of people on the planet who can speak Urartian, and he may be the only one who can read the language, which was written in a cuneiform script that was carved into stone. This documentary film tells the story of Kuşman and his struggles to learn the language and make the stones talk.