Co-presented with Telescope Film

KINO! Film Salon is a monthly online club to discuss films from Germany.
 
How it works: Each month we choose a German film currently available to stream on U.S. platforms, watch it independently, and come together for a hosted conversation with other fans of German cinema.

For our May session, we picked Fatih Akin’s 2004 blistering drama Head-On, which explores the intersections of romance, autonomy, and the clash between the traditional and modern worlds. The late Birol Ünel stars as Cahit, a Turkish-German man whose self-destructive impulses land him in a car crash—and, subsequently, in a psychiatric hospital. There, he meets Sibel (played by then-newcomer Sibel Kekilli), who is also Turkish-German and who has been institutionalized after attempting suicide. Needing a Turkish husband to escape her family’s suffocating grasp, Sibel convinces Cahit to marry her, but their sham marriage eventually grows into something real, leading to its own complications. Curator Jim Kolmar states, “It’s a thrilling, shattering film of love, sex, family loyalty, and a violence born of desperation. In Akin’s hands, it’s a work of great humanity and harsh reality— Head-On reaffirms him as one of the leading lights of contemporary film.”

Head-On won a staggering 26 awards, including the Golden Bear at the 2004 Berlinale and Best and a National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006.

Hosted by Jim Kolmar

Jim programs for SXSW and Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival, and was a founding committee member of Festival Internacional de Cine Tulum (FICTU). He has participated in numerous international festival juries, panels, and committees.

KINO!Film Salon is a production of Telescope Film, in partnership with the German Film Office.

Gegen die Wand
Dir. Fatih Akin
Germany, 2004
121 minutes
With Birol Ünel, Sibel Kekilli, Catrin Striebeck