The organizers of Osian's-Cinefan: 6th Festival of Asian Cinema, beginning in New Delhi on the evening of July 16, could not have found a better inaugural film.
Turkish-German director Fatih Akin's Gegen die Wand (Head On), about a young woman who marries a man twice her age simply because she sees in the union a chance to unshackle herself from her oppressively orthodox Islamic family, is lively, provocative and uncompromising. It is just the sort of gutsy film that has the potential of getting people talking - and the festival going.
Head On comes to Delhi with a formidable reputation. It won the Golden Bear at the 2004 Berlin Film Festival and was subsequently released in Germany amid much excitement, most of it generated by mass-circulation tabloid reports that its female star, 23-year-old Sibel Kekilla, had begun her showbiz life as a porn actress. But, doubtless, the fact that Head On was the first German film in 18 years to win the top prize in Berlin also gave its market value a huge fillip.
The hype apart, Head On is a truly spunky film. Director Fatih Akin, a German of Turkish descent, does not shy away from morally and politically dodgy territory. His controversial film records the life of Sibel, played by Kekilla, who marries a dissolute middle-aged Turkish-German punk. The two lost souls go on a hedonistic binge and have separate sexual affairs. Unknown to them, love sneaks into their lives and wreaks havoc. The husband kills one of Sibel's lovers in fit of jealousy.
Sibel's story begins at a point where she is down and out, laid up in a psychiatric clinic following a suicide attempt, traverses through the highs induced by unbridled indulgence and finally ends back in the dumps. But at least there has been movement in a life that had seemed doomed to complete stagnancy.
{{/usCountry}}Sibel's story begins at a point where she is down and out, laid up in a psychiatric clinic following a suicide attempt, traverses through the highs induced by unbridled indulgence and finally ends back in the dumps. But at least there has been movement in a life that had seemed doomed to complete stagnancy.
{{/usCountry}}In the clinic, Sibel meets the alcoholic punk, Cahit, played by Birol Ünel, a man who has seen much more of life. Spotting in the encounter an opportunity to escape the stifling confines of her conservative family, Sibel talks Cahit into entering into a marriage of convenience with her. Their wedding opens the gates to a life of freedom for Sibel, who is only to eager to plunge headlong into wild parties, hallucinatory drugs and lots of free sex.
Head On depicts the immigrant experience with all its contradictions, fears and hopes, but Akin does not hold out any false promises of a better future for deracinated people like Sibel. The wages of attempted escape from reality can be bitter and Sibel discovers that the hard way. Emancipation might seem like just a step away but it comes with a rather scary price tag.
The sexually explicit and frequently violent film has, as expected, sparked off a debate in Germany's Turkish community as well as in the German nation as a whole, where an effective assimilation policy for the two million Turks living in Germany still eludes police-makers.
Hamburg-based director Akin, 31, is the son of Turkish immigrants. He was always aware that the German-Turkish love story would raise the hackles of the more conservative members of Germany's 2.5-million-strong Turkish community. Even before the film was commercially released, the director has been pilloried by certain quarters on the grounds that he was seeking to exploit the problems confronting Turkish women in Germany. In fact, in the weeks leading up to the film's commercial release, Internet discussions centred on a call to boycott Head On.
But Akin hasn't flinched. After all, he has in the past delved into the predicament of young Turks in Germany struggling to merge cultures within themselves, has not let any of the murmurs of protest deflect him from his plans to bring the issue centrestage. Akin is accustomed to critical acclaim. His previous films -- Short Sharp Shock", Solino and In July - have earned him quite a following in Germany and elsewhere. But nothing that he did in the past would have prepared filmgoers for Head On. It has been quite a heady ride from the moment it hit its straps at the 54th Berlin Film Festival.
It is one opening film that could close all arguments on the utility of international film festivals.