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Materiality of Labour: Thomas Arslan’s Aus der Ferne/From Far Away (2006) and Seyhan Derin’s Ben Annemin Kızıyım/I Am My Mother’s Daughter (1996)

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Abstract

A key recurrent theme in Turkish German feature film is the permanent return to Turkey, often drawn as fantasised or idealised by migrant characters. Within Turkish German film culture, the return or the journey back to homeland—or Heimat as the term German cinema scholars often prefer to use—is frequently used as a dramatic plot device.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Forum, organized by the Arsenal Cinema is the experimental and avant-garde strand of the Berlin Film Festival: ‘it is regarded as the section of the Berlinale most willing to take risks and stands for new trends in world cinema and innovative narrative forms, bringing together the avant-garde, the experimental, film essays, long-term documentary projects, political reports and cinema from countries off the beaten track; anything that explores new avenues and unconventional ideas from beyond the mainstream can be found at the Forum’ (See Arsenal’s website: http://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/about/history/berlinale-forum.html).

  2. 2.

    See the film’s official website: http://www.peripherfilm.de/ausderferne/.

  3. 3.

    Original text: ‘Aus der Ferne ist kein verkitschtes Reisevideo, Arslan verzichtet auf die naheliegenden Bilder des Sonnenuntergangs über den Brücken des Bosporus oder faltiger alter Männer neben beladenen Lasteseln. Aus der Ferne ist auch kein anmaßender Blick aus Deutschland auf die Türkei, die hierzulande oft wahlweise als Militärdiktatur oder als Vorposten El-Kaidas dargestellt wird’ (Foerster 2006).

  4. 4.

    See the press kit on the film’s official website. http://www.peripherfilm.de/kinopresseservice/adf/heft.pdf (Accessed September 2015).

  5. 5.

    Sicinski names Nicholas Geyrhalter, Michael Glawogger, Harun Farocki, Hartmut Bitomsky, Andrei Ujica and Thomas Heise as some of the artists associated with this attitude.

  6. 6.

    See Fatih Akın’s The Edge of Heaven (2007) and Christian Petzold’s Jerichow (2009).

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Naiboglu, G. (2018). Materiality of Labour: Thomas Arslan’s Aus der Ferne/From Far Away (2006) and Seyhan Derin’s Ben Annemin Kızıyım/I Am My Mother’s Daughter (1996). In: Post-Unification Turkish German Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64431-8_5

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