In fact, as the television critic Sina Kologlu pointed out in an interview in Istanbul this week, the trailer bears a striking resemblance to the real-life testimonies of child brides around the country interviewed for a documentary film by women’s rights activists being released next week.

The film, entitled “Child Brides,” is the result of an 18-month information and awareness campaign conducted by the “Flying Broom” women’s rights group, which included seminars, conferences and meetings with local officials and families around the country, as well as a book and an academic research project.

“I was 13 years old when I was married off to a 30-year-old man I had never seen,” a woman, now 37, told campaigners at one of these meetings in the southeastern province of Van. “I always remained afraid of him.”

“I was married at 16,” another recounted at a meeting in Izmir, while other women spoke of violence, abuse and misery in testimonies collected in the campaign’s book. “We have spent 20 years in silence. We are still strangers to each other.”

A national average of 28 percent of Turkish women are married before the age of 18, Yildiz Ecevit, a sociology professor at Middle Eastern Technical University, told a parliamentary committee hearing on child brides in Ankara last month.

But regional differences mean that as many as 40 percent or 50 percent of girls are married off as minors in some parts of the country, particularly in eastern and central Anatolia, she added.

Reliable figures on child brides are hard to come by, a parliamentary commission said in a report last year, because official statistics do not register the unofficial religious marriages still prevalent in much of Anatolia. Childhood marriages are “widely accepted” by Turkish society, the report by the Commission on Equality of Opportunity for Women and Men found.

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Girls are married off early to minimize the economic burden on their family as well as the risk of any sexual contact before marriage, with the bride price that is still paid in many regions as an additional incentive, the commission report revealed.

As further causes, the report pointed to deeply rooted customs like the exchange of brides between two families, the betrothal of babies at birth, the giving of girls as brides to settle blood feuds, and the continued practice of polygamy in some regions.

In addition, girls who have been raped or molested are quickly married off to the rapist or any other man to preserve family honor, the report noted.

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The commission slammed child marriages as “violations of children’s rights, women’s rights and human rights,” pinpointing the practice as a prime cause of domestic violence, infant mortality and gender inequality.

“State institutions do not yet address this problem sufficiently,” the report found.

Selen Dogan, project coordinator of the “Flying Broom” campaign, agrees.

“Almost all local officials we spoke to at our conferences around the country agreed that this practice is a bad thing, but no one had ever done anything about it,” Ms. Dogan said in an interview.

The campaign had made some inroads, she said, reaching 20,000 people directly and many others via media reports and a hearing in Parliament last month, the culmination of the project.

“This cannot continue. We must do something about this immediately,” Fatma Sahin, the government minister in charge of family affairs, said at the hearing, pointing out that Turkish laws do not even agree on the definition of a child: The civil code defines a person as a child until the age of 17, the criminal code until 15 and the child protection law until 18.

Ms. Sahin announced that her ministry had recently signed an agreement with the Religious Affairs Department, under which the 60,000 imams employed by the department around the country would endeavor to teach their flocks that child marriages have no place in Islam.

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Ms. Dogan, the activist, hopes the television soap opera “Life Goes On” will spread a similarly enlightened message. “It could have a positive effect, but it all depends on the screenplay,” she said.

“Will the girl manage to get out of the marriage, is she strong, can she liberate herself? That would be a good thing. But if it turns out to be just another depiction of a destiny to be borne, then it will be a setback.”

The production company had contacted the “Flying Broom” as a courtesy, but not sought their advice for the screenplay, Ms. Dogan added.

Mr. Kirmizigul, a former crooner from the Kurdish southeast of the country, has directed several movies, including the 2009 film “I Saw the Sun” about the plight of a Kurdish family racked by the armed conflict in southeastern Turkey, which brought the suffering of the region’s population home to a wider Turkish audience.

“Life Goes On” is his first attempt at a television series.

Mr. Kirmizigul, who has not spoken to the press in three years, according to his publicist, declined to be interviewed for this article.

Women’s issues like rape and domestic violence have become an increasingly popular subject of Turkish soap operas over the past two to three years.

While some series initially adopted a chauvinistic point of view, pressure from women’s rights groups had caused a shift in perspective, in some cases even within an ongoing series, Mr. Kologlu, the television critic, said, citing the rape-themed series “What Is Fatmagul Guilty Of?” as an example.

As for “Life Goes On,” expectations are high, Mr. Kologlu said.

“From what I have seen, it will be an ambitious work, technically striking, a very lavish production,” he said. “The question is whether it will fulfill expectations when it comes to the content, the message.”