(Aşk, Mark ve Ölüm)
A film by Cem Kaya
Duration: 96 minutes, 2022, Germany, Turkish and German (with English Subtitles)
In the early 1960s, the so-called guest workers from Anatolia and other parts of Turkey were recruited by the Federal Republic of Germany. From the beginning there was something that always accompanied them and was part of their culture: their music – a piece of home in a foreign land. Over the years, independent musical directions developed in Germany that did not exist in this form in their mother country.
Cem Kaya’s dense documentary film essay is a tutorial in Turkish-German recent history that tells a tale of assembly line jobs, homesickness and family reunification, the bazaar in the elevated railway station at Berlin’s Bülowstraße, xenophobia and racism, the wistful songs of the early years and the hip-hop of the post-reunification period. These are the stories shared by musicians beginning with Metin Türköz and Yüksel Özkasap, to the psychedelic Derdiyoklar and the chart-topping rapper Muhabbet. Their music has evolved a long way from that of German bands and has always developed out of the Turkish community and its desires. This is the world of Radio Yilmaz, various music cassette labels, protest rocker Cem Karaca’s German exile, and wedding bands that also sing in Kurdish and Arabic to meet the demands of the market. Extensive archival research and an interest in Turkish popular culture are recurring themes in Cem Kaya’s work. With this film he has created a rhythmic and vividly narrated cinematic encyclopaedia of Turkish music in Germany.
The film title "Aşk, Mark ve Ölüm" is inspired by the poem of the same name by the author Aras Ören, which was set to music by the German band IDEAL in 1982.
World premiered at the 72. Berlin International Film Festival in 2022, the film was awarded the Panorama Audience Award at the festival.
About the Director: Cem Kaya
Born in Schweinfurt, Germany in 1976, he studied communication design in Stuttgart and worked first as a producer, editor and director of commercials and music videos before moving into documentary. His film Remake, Remix, Rip-Off, about the Turkish Yesilçam film industry that remakes Hollywood blockbusters for the domestic cinema market, premiered at Locarno. He is also a cinematographer and worked with others filming the investigative documentary 77sqm_9:26min, about the reconstruction of the NSU murder of Halit Yozgat, which premiered at documenta 14.
You can watch the film online on the
Goethe-Institut Kolkata Facebook page on the scheduled date and time.
Back
