Head On

Ever since Fatih Akin's Gegen die Wand (Head On) won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in February, the film's been in the news. Good news and bad news. The good news is that this weekend it became the first German film to open simultaneously in theaters in both Germany and Turkey. Briefly, GdW is an unlikely yet lively and enthralling love story involving two Germans of Turkish descent; for more, here are my initial impressions.

Reinhard Hesse has a solid piece in openDemocracy on the potential political and cultural impact of the film on one of the major questions facing Europe at present - particularly since it now seems that Al-Qaeda may very well have been responsible for the horrific bombings in Madrid last week and the strongest ties possible with a strategically placed predominantly Islamic democracy seems like an awfully darn good idea: Should the European Union take in Turkey as a member? Hesse rephrases that question:

Can there still be a serious argument over Turkey's eventual admission to the European Union when that country has, for all practical purposes, already arrived at the heart of Germany? Could it be that, at least for Turkish-born Germans who speak Hamburg slang far more fluently than any Anatolian idiom, life in Istanbul provides more freedom and liberality than struggling for your place in life in a German city? Will German recovery, once again, come from the margins, at least in cinema?

In my own neighborhood here in Berlin, Turkish Germans, German Turks, whatever, represent nearly 20 percent of the neighbors. About a block away, there's a huge billboard for the newly opened Ikea nearby - in Turkish, rather than in German. The number of Turkish papers rival that of German papers at the kiosks and so on and so on. Part of the thrill of GdW - besides the pace, performances and plot which combine to make what Hesse calls "a wild, rough, refreshing windstorm" - is seeing this reality up on the screen.

So that's the good news. The bad news comes courtesy of Germany's down-n-dirty yet thriving tabloid, Bild. Two days after the Golden Bear came the splashy headline: "Film-Diva in Wahrheit Porno-Star." Yes, it turns out that Sibel Kekilli had acted in nine porn flicks before taking a quiet job in Hamburg's city hall and then restarting her career when Akin cast her in GdW. But the reaction to this "revelation," as Volker Gunske outlines in a terrific column in tip (in German), was probably anything but what the tabloid had in mind. At first things were going Bild's way: Kekilli's father, who had moved to Germany from Turkey in the 70s was shocked and furious and immediately disowned his daughter - eventually, on Turkish television as well. This is the sort of blood Bild was hoping to draw.

But not only did Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick just as immediately voice his full support of Kekilli - and though I'd already really liked the guy, he flew up several notches on my list that day; love the phrase he used, too, literally translated as, "We stand behind her like a number one" - and hire Germany's top media lawyer to be on standby should she need one, but, as Gunske writes, "The outpouring of fury and disgust... simply never came about. Instead, all sympathies flew to the young woman who'd found herself in Bild's crosshairs."

Fans of German cinema may know that Bild itself was a star of sorts in Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta's 1975 film The Lost Honor of Katrina Blum, based on the novel by Heinrich Böll. Jürgen Fauth writes in his review:

The cynicism of the film's epilogue, when newspapermen with blood on their hands sanctimoniously rattle on about the freedom of the press seems farcical until you remember that Fox News advertises "fair and balanced reporting" with the same straight face, that the New York Post recently portrayed international diplomats with rodents' heads, and that Germany's BILD-Zeitung is still the best-selling paper in the country.

Gunske wraps his own column with this key question: "Do Kai Dieckmann's parents know that he's the editor of Bild?"

Posted by dwhudson at March 14, 2004 7:45 AM