Film
The Cut

Fatih Akin Summer Cinema

Thu, 07/26/2018
6:00 PM Goethe-Institut Chicago

Director: Fatih Akin, color, 135 min., 2013/14, with English subtitles

1915: In the town of Mardin, the blacksmith Nazaret Manogian lived a content life with his wife and twin daughters before being arrested by the Turkish police - just like the other Christians of Armenian origin. Separated from his family, he has to work as a forced laborer in the desert. He survives an execution squad and flees. Deserters help him along; he meets his dying sister-in-law in a camp, finds shelter and work in Aleppo with a Syrian soap manufacturer and also experiences the end of World War I there. Nazaret hears that his daughters have survived the Turkish genocide of the Armenians; his search leads him to Lebanon, Cuba and the USA. At least one of them survived. With The Cut, Fatih Akin has succeeded in creating a great but also controversial epic.

Fatih Akin, born in Hamburg in 1973 as the son of Turkish immigrants, belongs to the first generation of immigrant children. He brought their perspective to German cinema and surprised with his first two feature films "Short and Painless" (1998) and "In July'" (2000). Akin told stories from his personal experience and played with the genre patterns of gangster film and romance. Thus he found an idiosyncratic mix of author- and genre cinema.