DAAD Jahrestagung (Annual Conference of the German Academic Exchange Service)

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Turkish-German Cinema in a European Context

‘The New German Cinema is Turkish’, wrote Tunçay Kulaoğlu in an enthusiastic review about the films of Fatih Akin and other Turkish-German filmmakers who came to the fore in the late 1990s. Kulaoğlu’s much-cited endorsement indicates that Turkish-German cinema has, until quite recently, been conceptualized in terms of German national cinema, representing a particular sub-category that reflects the ‘hyphenated identity’ of its creators. This framework, however, ignores the transnational dimension of Turkish-German cinema.

I propose an alternative conceptual framework which situates Turkish-German cinema alongside similar hyphenated identity cinemas, such as British-Asian and Maghrebi-French cinema, and which identifies the (post)memory of migration and diaspora as central to the film’s thematic concerns and aesthetic strategies.

The experience of migration, displacement and various forms of transnational mobility play a crucial role in migrant and diasporic films. The paper examines how mobility affects the diasporic family and what impact it has on gender and generational relationship in Feo Aladağ’s Die Fremde (2010), the British-Asian comedy West is West (Andy De Emmony, 2010) and Yasemin and Nesrin Samdereli’s Almanya – Willkommen in Deutschland (2011).





Turkish-German Cinema in a Europea
Period6 Dec 2012
Event typeConference
LocationCumberland Lodge, Windsor, United KingdomShow on map