My Father, the Guest Worker / Mein Vater, der Gastarbeiter
Year of release: 1995
Directed by: Yüksel Yavuz
Germany
The film chronicles the memories of Yüksel Yavuz's father, who migrated to Germany in 1968, where he worked in a fish factory and ship building wharf.
To ease his father's solitude, Yavuz joined him and stayed whereas his father eventually returned to his village in Eastern Turkey. The documentary film represents an attempt to preserve his father’s efforts and achievements as a guest worker in Germany, achievements which have clearly not been recognised publicly: "I saw that my father worked like crazy in order to leave some traces which would prove that he was esteemed and irreplaceable, traces which would compensate for the traces with which hard physical labour had scarred his body. The last and most durable trace was I. He had called upon me to be his successor." It bears witness to the plight, the exploitation and the transitoriness of his father’s sojourn in Germany and to that of other guest workers like him.
Filed under: Documentary | Family memories | Fathers | Sons | Turkish German