European Film Festival Reviews:

Almanya - Wilkommen in Deutchland
(Welcome to Germany)

By Madelene Wightman

[Part 1]

Last weekend, the European Film Festival opened in Colombo with ‘Almanya - Wilkommen in Deutchland (Welcome to Germany)’.

The film marks the cinematic debut of Yasemin Samdereli. Born in Germany in 1973, the film maker studied at the College of Film and Television in Munich from 1993 to 2000. Between 1994 and 1999, she was a freelancer for Bavaria Film and worked as an assistant director on a number of international productions. In 2002, she directed a television comedy and was also a co-writer for a TV series.

A scene from the film

The central question in 'Almanya - Welcome to Germany', is “Am I German or Tukish?”. It is a surprisingly engaging and entertaining drama about a Turkish family who have lived in Germany since the 1960s. The film is essentially told from the perspective of Canan, a college-age girl eager to share family lore with her 6 year-old cousin Cenk. The film bounces engagingly between past and present. In 1964, a mustachioed charmer named Hüseyin leaves his wife and children in Turkey to join the ranks of immigrants enabling Germany's "economic miracle." Bringing his family over as soon as he gets his feet under him, he then watches as his four children become thoroughly German. Decades later, the gruffly lovable patriarch arranges to buy a run-down house in their old village and shames his descendants into joining an all-family mission to renovate it.

When the grandfather announces he has bought a summer house in Turkey, just after he and his wife have finally become German citizens, a journey starts, taking the family through their past and their two cultures. We see how the identities of grandfather and grandmother have changed so much since they first left Turkey for Germany, where once they identified totally as Turkish, they now feel just as Turkish inside but have become totally used to life in Germany and find elements of Turkey quite alien now they return. At the same time their grandson finds he isn't accepted by his school friends - he's neither properly German nor Turkish.

The production is well structured and filmed, using a documentary approach to the historical elements of the story and with wonderful surreal touches to highlight the emotional journey of the characters. There are dream sequences including grandfather's nightmare about what German citizenship might involve. There are also some interesting details, such as an embroidered handkerchief that grandfather had given to grandmother when he had first gone to Germany, which add subtlety and depth to the story.

Situations faced by Alymanya’s immigrant Turkish family may be specifically German, but at the centre of Yasemin Samdereli’s amenable drama, which she co-wrote with her sister Nesrin Samdereli, is an eloquently-expressed appeal for understanding and tolerance which shouldn’t fall on deaf ears outside its homeland.

‘Almanya’ has an appealing freshness to its writing and performances, which carries the viewer over some of its more endearing qualities (a lisping six-year-old boy; performers who address younger versions of themselves on screen, giving a blue-sky vision of the Eastern Mediterranean).

The film seeks to present Turkey to wider audiences in a less-threatening manner than its often-forbidding domestic cinema. It also manages to gloss over over some of the grittier aspects of immigrant life in the West, whilst still making valid comments It seems that Sandereli’s background in television has led her to make a play for wider audiences.

A scene from the film

This certainly isn’t life on the mean streets of Hamburg. Huseyin may work building the roads, but we get few glimpses of his sweat and toil. The language confusion is neatly dealt with linguistically by Samdereli, and there are some sweetly funny moments involving an attempt at Christmas and the terror of seeing Christ on a cross. Performances are beguiling, from the children/young parents and their older counterparts alike, to the point where, when the Samdereli sisters start to tug energetically on the viewer’s heartstrings, resistance is futile.

Technically this is a studio-bound piece, leavened by period newsreel footage, and only visually comes to life on location in Turkey, and even then in a picture postcard way. Some sequences, including a dream interlude in a passport official’s office, demonstrate Samdereli’s roots in scripting TV comedy.

While Samdereli effectively mines little culture-clash details for their comic value (Western toilets are baffling, as is Christianity, which one Turkish child amusingly interprets as sanctified cannibalism), the director/co-writer refuse to acknowledge any serious hardship or angst. A bit of schoolyard teasing is the biggest challenge immigrants face here. When unrelated difficulties arise, the film's blanketing pep hardly allows them to sink in. Canan is hiding an unexpected pregnancy, for example, and it feels about as weighty as if she had dented Mom's car.

The film's core performances walk the line between charm and sappiness, with Vedat Erincin(as the elder incarnation of Hüseyin) offering just enough wryness to balance the bland cuteness of younger costars. Nothing in his friendly-bear demeanor can inject gravitas in a film designed solely to congratulate a wave of successful workmen and their descendants, but few in this film's demographic will have a problem with that.

If immigration has been the source of major strife in Europe, you'd never know it from Almanya, as it has an overpowering feel-good vibe which has little room for real-world hardship. Thoroughly commercial, the film should appeal to Turkish immigrants in particular, but its take on old country/New World identity issues is general enough to resonate with other communities as well.