Year of release: 2002
This Turkish German coming-of-age story centres on seventeen-year-old Johanna, who lives with her single mother in Cologne. Her one ambition in life is to become a fashion designer but she needs to find the money to study in Paris.
Filed under: Coming of age | Daughters | Fathers | Patriarchy | Secrets | Turkish German
Year of release: 2005
Culture-clash comedy which centres on Bruce Lee fan and young Turkish hip-hopper Ibo, who lives in Hamburg and dreams of making the first-ever German kung-fu film.
Filed under: Fathers | Inter-ethnic romance | Mothers | Turkish German | Wedding / Marriage
Year of release: 1998
Lola (Gandi Mukli) performing as one of The Women Guest Workers (courtesy of zero fiction film)
Set in Berlin's Turkish German gay and transvestite subculture, the film tells the story of Lola, a drag queen in a cabaret act called 'Die Gastarbeiterinnen' (the female guest workers), her macho lover Bilidikid and her brother Murat. The disclosure of her sexual identity resulted in her being evicted from her traditional Turkish family seventeen years ago.
Filed under: Patriarchy | Queer diaspora | Secrets | Turkish German
Year of release: 1995
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.
Filed under: Documentary | Family memories | Fathers | Sons | Turkish German
Year of release: 2001
Anam is a 40-year-old traditional Turkish wife and mother who lives with her family in Germany where she works as a cleaning lady.
Filed under: Mothers | Turkish German
Year of release: 2006
Züli Aladag's controversial made-for-television film Rage imagines the encounter between a white middle-class German family and a young Turkish migrant, who intrudes into the family and terrorises them, as an escalation of violence that challenges the liberal values of the hegemonic family.
Filed under: Coming of age | Crime | Fathers | Patriarchy | Secrets | Sons | Turkish German
Year of release: 2011
Anna Hepp's documentary portrait of two families with German and Turkish backgrounds living in Germany’s Ruhr district examines the social network of the protagonists and portrays them as people who build a bridge between two cultures, religions and traditions.
Filed under: Turkish German
Year of release: 1975
Set in 1971, the film centres on Shirin, a young woman from a poor family in rural Anatolia, who elopes from a marriage with a local administrator arranged by her paternal uncles while her father is in prison. Despite its pertinent title, the film does not actually feature a wedding ceremony.
Filed under: Patriarchy | Turkish German | Wedding / Marriage
Year of release: 2007
Courtesy of Corazón International
The film traces the journeys of sons and daughters, mothers and fathers between Turkey and Germany, searching for each other. In the process, families fall apart through conflicts and sudden deaths and, in the end, new familial bonds are forged.
Filed under: Fathers | Journey | Mothers | Queer diaspora | Turkish German
Year of release: 2000
Ayse Polat’s road movie cum coming-of-age film Tour Abroad, which has been compared to Central Station (Walter Salles, Brazil, 1998) and Kolya (Jan Sverak, Czech Republic, 1997) and Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, 1974), sketches the development of a father-daughter relationship between an orphaned eleven-year-old girl and a would-be Turkish drag queen.
Filed under: Coming of age | Daughters | Fathers | Journey | Mothers | Queer diaspora | Turkish German