Film and Film

“When We Leave”

The existence of millions of Turkey citizens, who live in Germany, since more than four decades, is a socio-political, labor and cultural problem that has generated all kinds of conflicts and influenced the growth of xenophobia. It is a very different culture with different behavioral patterns opposite to the West, and in particular opposite to the German culture; the shock was inevitable and very noticeable, especially talking about the women, because of our different way of understanding and living everything about women behavior and freedom, including sexual and couple behaviors.

This topic which refers to the situation of women has been taken to the big screen by the New German Cinema since 1980s, but it has been seen basically by German directors and not so much by filmmakers from that tradition. Tevfik Baser a Turkish-German made a well-known tape in 1985 based on the situation of a Turkish married woman in "Forty square meters Germany", topic on which he returned in 1988 with "Fired from a false paradise"; and German Hark Bohm analyzed these issues through a young Turkish at Germany in "Yasemin" in 1988, tape that received many distinctions, among them the Award German film called "Lola". A decade later appears with great force a series of Turkish-German youth that portray their experience having grown up as foreigners and marginalized in Germany.

Now it is different, because there is already more than one generation that was born there in the starting country but grew in the Turkish culture of their parents, i.e. hundreds of thousands of Turkish people who prefer to speak German and that in one way or another have been adapted to German society, in particular, women who feel better in this society that in the tradition of their parents.

This is the theme of the film and so is more or less easy to assume the matter and the plot; we can observe what the new elements in the structure of the narrative are, in its development, its climax and outcome. The least developed element in the plot is the creation and description of the characters, which falls on some stereotypes and clichés, understandable by the fact that its Director comes from television and that burden is not so easy to overcome, as also by the desire to express and narrate a story full of drama that occasionally become a melodramatic exaggeration which overload the situation and it is difficult to be endured by the protagonist.

The tape becomes a critical look at certain traditions and customs strongly rooted in these people living in a foreign country, conducted by an Austrian woman, not Turkish, Feodora Schenk, married to the director and producer Züli Aladag, so she signs the script and its direction as Feo Aladag. With these data, it is easy to assume that Feo did not need too much to realize, through the new relationships she had with her husband environment, about the condition of life of these women and about the growing “honour killings” in Germany ,as she herself called them. That was the reason she was devoted to an extensive investigation that concluded in the script she wrote.

Her husband is part of this large group of Turkish-German people, dedicated to film and television in Germany, with hits for speaking about their internal situation, contradictions and conflicts with the society that receives them, and in particular about the foreigner who live outside the law in Germany, precisely in the country of law and order. Germans between terrified, incredulous and outraged have seen a series of Turkish filmmakers tell them how they live and thrive in Germanic society, notably between gangs of traffickers, drug addicts, criminals and other illegal activities that all these foreigners develop as marginalized. Talk about the particular condition of these filmmakers, makes immediately reference to Fatih Akin, who has enjoyed great international success and is today the most prominent with an extensive filmography. To close these extensive parentheses and to illustrate this matter, not many years ago, a German journalist who saw this unusual success of these Turkish-German people headlined his note "The new German cinema is now Turkish", which generated a huge controversy at the national level).