Before being forced to marry a landowner, Shirin leaves Turkey and flees to Cologne to find Mahmud, the man she really loves. Once there, unemployed and in danger of losing her residence, she is forced to become a prostitute in order to survive. Screened as part of the retrospective ‘An Alternate Cinema’ at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival and starring Jürgen Prochnow, a regular in the films of John Carpenter and David Lynch, the film narrates the historical perspective of Turkish immigrants in post-war Germany with naïve style and highly stylised black and white. Director Helma Sanders-Brahms, the flagship of the New German Cinema, focuses on the collective experience of working-class women and their struggle for survival and emancipation with a melodramatic aura while maintaining a sense of social realism.
Helma Sanders-Brahms
She was born in 1940 in Emden (Germany) and died in 2014 in Berlin. She trained as a theatre actress in Hannover and studied German, English and Pedagogy before working as a television presenter in Cologne. In Italy she worked under filmmakers like Sergio Corbucci and Pier Paolo Pasolini, before making her debut in 1970 with a documentary about Angelika Urban, which won an award at Oberhausen. She subsequently made television films and critical documentaries. In 1975 she directed ‘Under the Beach’s Cobbles’, which marked a turning point in her career by including the subjective factor in her films so as to confront the perspective of her protagonists with the dominant social situation. The television premiere of ‘Shirin’s Wedding’ in 1976 caused a stir throughout the country and the film’s lead actress received death threats.
Screenings
O.V. in German, Turkish, Greek subtitled in English and Spanish
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