Turks' German culture clash given a voice by film series
According to the 2003 "Britannica's Book of the Year," 2.5 million Turks account for almost 4 percent of Germany's population, by far its largest minority. (The Kurds are distant runners-up.) As you might expect, the strangers-in-a-strange-land conflicts produce a revolving tension between the Turks' native culture and their adopted one, and produces a third culture, as the generations pass, that is a fusion of the two. That third culture has begun to express itself in German popular culture.
"Young Turks of the German Cinema," a film series co-presented by the Harvard Film Archive and Goethe-Institut Boston, showcases the extent to which the country's Turkish voice has learned to speak in the first person -- and in German, too. The eight-film series begins Friday and is attention-getting, particularly because it's been programmed with the notion of cultural fluidity in mind.
In "I Think About Germany: We Forgot to Go Back," Fatih Akin examines his family in both countries. His mother left Turkey resentful of his father for uprooting her. But, to her husband's surprise, she began to see herself as something besides a housewife, becoming an outspoken schoolteacher. The film's strength is the compelling notion of homeland it raises, suggesting that for some, it's a state of mind. We meet Akin's non-native German friends, and start to see the ethnic expansion of a country that, historically, has seemed so uncomfortable with it.
Aysun Bademosoy's documentary "German Cops" takes the conflict of self-perception and how one is perceived into the area of law enforcement. Centering on five immigrant officers who patrol a Berlin precinct, the film is long on passive observation and lacking any real investigation, but it offers some insights. For instance, one of the movie's young Turkish cops embraces the simplified idea that the police are good and the criminals are not, a belief that casts foreign-born cops as traitors in the eyes of some of their countrymen.
Most of the films offer glimpses of Turks on the margins of Berlin culture, ensnared in crime dramas -- writer-director Thomas Arslan's "Dealer," Sinan Akkus's "Sevda Means Love," and a fiction short from Akin called "Weed." But the major discovery -- or rediscovery -- is "Lola and Billy the Kid," a daring family melodrama that made its way around the United States in 1999. Five years has done nothing to rob the movie of its lurid power. It rages up from the Berlin underground like a fist.
Writer and director Kutlug Ataman takes every inch of the situations presented in several of the other films (poverty, disenfranchisement, assimilation versus cultural custom) and turns them inside out, tacking on the elsewhere unmentioned taboo of homosexuality.
The film's attention is split between Lola (Gandi Mukli), a drag queen, his self-loathing hustler boyfriend Billy the Kid (Erdal Yildiz), and Lola's 16-year-old-brother Murat (Baki Davrak), who's exploring his attraction to men. The younger brother was born around the time the boys' macho older brother disowned Lola. As they try to repair the family, all hell breaks murderously loose.
Ataman hitches the psycho-emotional cruelties of certain Fassbinder love-tragedies to the basic story structure of Visconti's "Rocco and his Brothers." The finished film takes on Turkish cultural rigidity, a severely ignored German underclass, hate crimes, and the challenges of making love endure in a world of drag shows and hustling. Here's a movie that pushes a handful of neglected subjects to a country's attention. And it breaks a few rules along the way, as any Young Turk must.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
