Feature – International / UK Premiere
Showing @ Cameo 1, Thu 23 June @ 17:45 & Sat 25 June @ 13:00
Yasemin Şamdereli / Germany / 2010 / 101 mins
Turkish-German director Yasemin Şamdereli’s comedy on cultural integration and national identity is a heartening portrayal wrapped in its own investigation. Shown as the land of the ‘economic miracle’, Germany is the saviour for the Turkish Yilmaz family who flee Turkey for a more stable life. Superficially a quite simple flashback movie, the narrative flits back and forth between the 1960s mother and father Hüseyin and Fatma (Fahri Ögün Yardim and Demet Gül) travelling to Almanya and their large family in the present day. After Hüseyin buys a holiday home in Turkey however, the family embark on a journey to rediscover their national heritage.
A clear satire of EU membership, there’s an ironic racism floating throughout the film; as Hüseyin and Fatma apply for German membership after forty-five years, a dream sequence suggests they’ll have to eat pork dinners multiple times a week for the rest of their lives. And there’s this perceived European liberalism in which the women who show cleavage appear less moral than the more traditional Turkish wives. For all its parody however, there’s an undercutting foundation, similar to the portrayal of Germany in Off the Beaten Track, which suggests the country is a modern day liberator. Yet does economic stability and security overpower the sense of self which our ancestry provides? It’s this question which Şamdereli can never truly seem to answer; by having the family travel back to Turkey there’s the suggestion that nothing can conquer our longing for place but there’s also the implication that our awareness of how history dictates identity is enough to provide closure. Quite light but riddled with socio-political tensions, the film is at times weighed down by its crippling use of symbolism but remains a largely gentle probe of cross-cultural acceptance and recognition.