Year of release: 1991
In this film about the tragic consequences of arranged marriage, Metin, a young man of Kurdish origin is lured back from Germany, where he has found work and a blonde German girlfriend, to his native village in rural Anatolia, under the pretext that his mother is dying.
Filed under: Patriarchy | Turkish German | Wedding / Marriage
Year of release: 1999
Salford, 1971. Proud Pakistani chip shop owner George Khan lives in a terraced house with his white wife Ella and their seven children. Determined to raise them as traditional Muslims, George sends sons Nazir, Abdul, Tariq, Saleem, Maneer and Sajid to the mosque and makes daughter Meenah dress in saris. However the kids will not submit quietly.
Filed under: Asian British | Coming of age | Fathers | Mothers | Patriarchy | Queer diaspora | Religion
Year of release: 2002
Züli Aladag's feature film debut Elephant Heart is a coming-of-age story about a young boxer in the amateur league, who dreams of going professional but has to learn what sacrifices he has to make if he wants to reaslise his ambition. At the centre of the strory is Marco - played by Germany's rising star Daniela Brühl (Good Bye, Lenin! and The Edukators) - a young amateur boxer searching for his own identity.
Filed under: Coming of age | Crime | Fathers | Sons | Turkish German
Year of release: 2009
Courtesy of Luna Film and Cinemendo, © Peter Nix
Set in contemporary Berlin, the multi-strand narrative of Evet, I Do features four inter-ethnic romances between Turkish-German, Kurdish-German, Turkish, gay and heterosexual couples all of whom want to marry one another.
Filed under: Inter-ethnic romance | Turkish German | Wedding / Marriage
Year of release: 2004
Courtesy of WÜSTE Film © Kerstin Stelter
The film tells the story of Cahit, a self-destructive, alcoholic, cocaine-sniffing, 44 year-old Turk living in Hamburg and the 20 year-old, beautiful Turkish girl Sibel.
Filed under: Journey | Patriarchy | Turkish German | Wedding / Marriage
Year of release: 2005
Literary talk-show host Georges Laurent, his wife Anne, a successful publisher, and their son Pierrot receive a number of video tapes which suggest that their home is under surveillance, from an anonymous sender. Mysterious drawings accompany these tapes. The alarmed Georges, though not letting his wife in on the secret, has an idea who the sender might be - and he tracks him down.
Filed under: Family memories | History | Secrets
Year of release: 1996
In this autobiographical documentary Seyhan Derin, who was born in Turkey and grew up in Germany, explores her parents' migratory history, focusing in particular on her mother's experience.
Filed under: Daughters | Documentary | Mothers | Patriarchy | Turkish German
Year of release: 2005
Courtesy of Sandhya Suri
I for India is a chronicle of immigration in Britain, from the Sixties to the present day, as seen through the eyes of one Asian family and their movie camera.
Filed under: Asian British | Daughters | Documentary | Family memories | Fathers
Year of release: 1997
Mémoires d'immigrés: L'héritage maghrébin, a film directed by Yamina Benguigui
Yamina Benguigui, a woman filmmaker of Algerian descent, described this documentary film project as ‘the narrative of my journey at the heart of the Maghrebi immigration in France. The history of fathers, mothers, children, the history of my father, of my mother. My history’. The tripartite documentary gives an account of the collective memory of the Maghrebi diaspora in France, juxtaposing the voices of Maghrebi immigrants wtth those of state officials who devised or implemented immigration and social policies.
Filed under: Family memories | Maghrebi French
Year of release: 2001
Courtesy of Yamina Benguigui/Bandits Production
Set in the French town of St. Quentin, Yamina Benguigui's first feature film tells the story of French immigration from a women's perspective. It was inspired by the experience of the filmmaker's own mother, who like countless other women followed their husbands to France in the mid-1970s, following a change in French immigration legislation.
Filed under: Maghrebi French | Patriarchy