Sunday 16 October 2011

When We Leave

Another great German film dealing with the problems of a multicultural society. Being set in Berlin, it's pretty easy to figure out that it will revolve around Turkish in Germany.
What I pretty much like of this film is that it focuses on problems inside a multicultural family, but not a family with people coming from different cultures, but a family which members have developed different cultures. This way, the main character in the film is a westernized German-Turkish twenty something woman with traditional Turkish parents and older brother, and half traditional younger brother and sister.

Our young lady, Umay (the incredibly beautiful Sibel Kekilli) flees with her child from her violent husband in Turkey and returns to her family home in Berlin. Her family does not accept her breaking her marriage and try to force her to return to her husband. When this says that he's no longer interested in "a German whore" they try to take Umay's child and take him to his father. Umay has to escape from her family and keep away from them, this is emotinally devastating for her, but all her attempts of reconciling with her family (that blindly believe that she has brought shame and ruin upon them with her "horrible" action) painfully fail.
The story develops harsher as it slowly gets on, with some really tough moments, but also with some moments where we're drawn to believe that hope still exists.
As I've said, the film is rather slow (contrary to Head-On the film that gained Sibel public attention), but it's deeply intense and powerful, and profoundly beautiful. I think this is in good part thanks to the excellent performance of Sibel, well, it's not just because I consider her terribly attractive, it's because her skinny body and her "Modigliani face" can convey sadness, pain and even happyness in such a convincent manner.

This film is a must, and is one more wake up call on how Europe needs to deal with the topic of integrating not just immigrants, but the second and third generation ones.
Umay is the perfect example of integration, her best friend is a German girl, she starts a relation with a German guy, she picks up her studies with the intent to go to the University... so she's a German woman with Turkish background. On the other hand, the rest of her family seem barely integrated (either because of their obsession with tradition, or for the acceptance of the submissive role of women, or just because they don't seem to relate to non Turkish people in the whole film).

I guess Sibel had to feel really comfortable in her role, as in the real life she's a very solid example of integration, she has even criticized Islam for being inherently violent
I have experienced myself that physical and psychological violence is seen as normal in Muslim families. Unfortunately violence belongs to the culture in Islam."
My hat off to you lady :-)

Sadly enough, the film seems to be inspired by real events. Forced marriage and honour killings in Western Europe in the XXI century... shit, we've done something terribly bad in the last decades...

By the way, I guess Berlin's Tourist Office had nothing to do with this film, cause we have very few scenes where some landmark of the city is shown (you could think that it's set in any other large German city). This said, it's curious to say that I think I know one of the localizations, the place where Sibel gives her little brother a letter for Mum seems like the "50 faces" in Kreuzberg to me (you just see a small graffiti there and it's not a face... but anyway I would bet it's located there).

Update March 2012: from my last trips to Berlin I think I can also confirm that the scene from which I captured the image below is set on the Warschauer Strasse S-Bhan station.


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