During his press conference in Cannes this year, when Fatih Akin was obviously happy and relieved about the enthusiastic applause for his film The Edge of Heaven, when he delightedly welcomed any sign of interest, and in his excitement spoke almost non-stop in broken English, you simply had to take a big liking to him. Fatih Akin’s presence in Cannes was like that of some agreeable outsider, as little suited to the festival’s sometimes all too affected cineastic pathos as were his replies to some of the journalists’ questions, which in his eagerness frequently included small personal digressions and confessions (“Hey, Scorsese was my man!”). Perhaps the director’s mentality should not be compared to that of his films, yet there are still a number of features that they certainly have in common: liveliness, honesty and passion. Whether it is his debut film Short Sharp Shock, the melodrama Head-On, the documentary film about Istanbul’s music scene Crossing the Bridge, or his latest film The Edge of Heaven – Fatih Akin has always sought direct access to his characters, to their conflicts and their emotions. Like his colleague Quentin Tarantino, his kind of films are the result of an early and insatiable appetite for the cinema.
Pioneer of the new German-Turkish film
Akin, whose parents are Turks, studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Hamburg, although in fact his real university was his cousin’s video rental shop. That was where as a child Akin became engrossed in Italo-westerns and action films, and discovered the works of his great role model, Martin Scorsese. Hamburg-Altona became Fatih Akin’s Little Italy. It was on the streets of this multicultural city quarter that he made his first film in 1998, the genre film Short Sharp Shock. When this film was released in Germany, Akin announced with a certain self-confidence: “It took Scorsese and the other Italo-Americans 70 years to start making their films. The Maghribi-French needed 30 years for their cinéma beur. We were much quicker. We’re already doing it!” The plot of his first film, about a cordial friendship between a Turk, a Serb and a Greek, was put together right in front of his own front door. What emerged amidst red-light district bars, Turkish sofas and Serbian weddings was a lively image of a whole district, with its small-time crooks, its hussies and its local big shots. Short Sharp Shock represented a new German-Turkish cinema, expressing itself self-assuredly as it made its way onto German screens in the late 1990s. Interestingly enough, Akin’s most convincing films are still infused with the spirit of Hamburg-Altona, while the road movie In July (2000) and the German-Italian family story Solino (2002) seem peculiarly anaemic.
The strength of the film Head-On, which catapulted Akin onto the international scene and gained him the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and the European Film Award, also lies in the honest, politically-incorrect boldness with which Akin depicted the German-Turkish milieu of his city quarter. The film’s heroine Sibel enters into a marriage of convenience because her own Turkish family, with its traditional morals, is standing in the way of her fulfilling her dreams. Her supposed husband, who is also of Turkish origins, is a drunken drug-taking drop-out called Cahit who lives in a small apartment full of empty beer cans. And yet Head-On is primarily a love story, an emotional film that purposely diverges from the German-Turkish problem films of the 1970s and 1980s. “Identity seeking between the cultures, I just don’t want to hear that kind of thing again,” says Akin. “Such clichés no longer apply to me and my generation.”
Nevertheless, he repeatedly takes a stand on specific issues – for example, the anti-Islamic tendencies that emerged following September 11, or the debate about Turkey’s accession to the European Union, on which he commented in a cocky Hamburg accent: “Suddenly everything you say or do is held against you.” Akin responds to the trends with neither bitterness nor disdain. Instead he headed right for the heart of the “alien” and made a documentary film about the incredibly lively, multifaceted, hybrid and cosmopolitan music scene in Istanbul entitled Crossing the Bridge. This name can also be read as a kind of agenda for his film-making in general, which from the very outset roved like a freebooter between the different cultures.
A mixture of affection and respect
In his new film The Edge of Heaven, which received a prize in Cannes for the best screenplay, Akin undertakes not only a surprisingly serene, reflective treatment of the worlds that have influenced him, the film also resounds with a whole new tone. It is a story about chance and fate, death and sacrifice. It links the settings of Istanbul, Bremen and Hamburg. And it brings together people whose lives are then changed by their encounters: a young German woman falls in love with a female Turkish oppositionist and is killed in Istanbul. Her mother, played by the German Fassbinder icon Hanna Schygulla, goes in search of the last traces left by her daughter. A Turkish widower in Germany “buys” a Turkish prostitute as a companion. When the woman dies, the man’s son, a professor of German studies, looks for her daughter in Istanbul. The Edge of Heaven links all these figures in a chain of fatal events, in the course of which they come to know and respect the wishes, ideas and plans of another person after their death. The strong point of this restrained melodrama is the attitude with which Akin encounters his characters. It is a mixture of affection and respect. Akin expects his characters to put up with the greatest pain, the worst loss, yet his film makes do without any great drama. He relies on gestures, looks and embraces, that is to say, on his actors, whom he sometimes simply allows to be silent. After all, a facial expression, a physical stance, can say it all. When Hanna Schygulla is overcome by the loss of her daughter, for example, the camera withdraws to the upper corner of the hotel room in Istanbul, as if not wanting to harass the mother in her pain.
German-Turkish reflections
The Edge of Heaven is a film in which for the first time Akin deliberately raises political questions, engaging with current politics in Turkey and the problems Germany faces with immigration. According to Akin, his films are actually a kind of German-Turkish chronicle: “In Short Sharp Shock there were still Turkish gangsters and thieves. In Head-On I dealt with Turkish proletarians, among whom the step from illegality to legality had been taken, and in my new film there is even a Turkish professor of German studies. All these films reflect the history of Turkish migrants in Germany.” He has participated in festival competitions in Berlin and Cannes, won a Golden Bear and a screenplay award – doesn’t so much success go to your head? During a premiere party at a villa in the hills above Cannes, Fatih Akin was boisterously running around playing Turkish club hits and repeatedly kissing his crew members: “That’s all just like in a film!” So there’s no real need to worry, Fatih Akin cannot lose his head, because he has never left Hamburg-Altona.
Katja Nicodemus
