Year of release: 1990
The story of a family who leave their poor Turkish village and six of their seven children behind, seeking a more prosperous life in Switzerland. Together with their youngest son, they embark on a hazardous journey across the Alps.
Year of release: 2003
Set in New York's NRI community, the film centres on a love triangle involving Naina, Aman and Rohit. Aman, who is suffereing from a fatal heart condition tries to inspire everyone around him to enjoy life since 'tomorrow may never come'.
Filed under: Secrets | South Asian diaspora | Wedding / Marriage
Year of release: 2002
This Turkish German coming-of-age story centres on seventeen-year-old Johanna, who lives with her single mother in Cologne. Her one ambition in life is to become a fashion designer but she needs to find the money to study in Paris.
Filed under: Coming of age | Daughters | Fathers | Patriarchy | Secrets | Turkish German
Year of release: 2005
Culture-clash comedy which centres on Bruce Lee fan and young Turkish hip-hopper Ibo, who lives in Hamburg and dreams of making the first-ever German kung-fu film.
Filed under: Fathers | Inter-ethnic romance | Mothers | Turkish German | Wedding / Marriage
Year of release: 2012
Kuma (courtesy of Wega Film)
When Ayşe celebrates her wedding almost everyone in her Turkish village believes her to have married Hasan who is just a few years her senior. But in fact, she is sent to Vienna as Hasan’s father Mustafa’s second wife. She arrives in Austria and receives a mixed welcome from her new family. At first, Mustafa’s children, some of whom are older than Ayşe, turn their back on the girl. Only Fatma, Mustafa’s wife of many years who is now dying of cancer, seems genuinely pleased: now she can be assured of a good successor to tend to her husband, to whom she has been a loyal and obedient Muslim wife.
A special friendship evolves between the two different women but this relationship is soon put to the test when the family has to face a stroke of fate.
Director Umut Dag’s description of the complex microcosm of a Turkish family living in Vienna displays a great deal of sensitivity in a work that explores the relationship between the old and the new, loyalty and friendship, and is not afraid to broach deep-seated emotions.
Filed under: Daughters | Fathers | Mothers | Wedding / Marriage
Year of release: 2004
Ismaël Ferroukhi's first feature is a touching road movie about an elderly Moroccan father, resident in Southern France, who pressurises his irreligious 17-year-old son, Reda, to drive him on a 3,000 mile Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
Filed under: Fathers | Journey | Maghrebi French | Religion | Sons
Year of release: 2009
The drama explores the relations between a grief stricken father and his three daughters. Set in London, the time is now, the family of Indian origin- part of the UK diaspora.
Filed under: Asian British | Fathers
Year of release: 2001
Alloune, a Senegalese tourist guide working in the History of Slavery Museum on the island of Goree, Senegal, decides to trace his ancestors’ routes, who were sold as slaves to the New World around 1800.
Filed under: Crime | Family memories | Inter-ethnic romance | Journey
Year of release: 1998
Lola (Gandi Mukli) performing as one of The Women Guest Workers (courtesy of zero fiction film)
Set in Berlin's Turkish German gay and transvestite subculture, the film tells the story of Lola, a drag queen in a cabaret act called 'Die Gastarbeiterinnen' (the female guest workers), her macho lover Bilidikid and her brother Murat. The disclosure of her sexual identity resulted in her being evicted from her traditional Turkish family seventeen years ago.
Filed under: Patriarchy | Queer diaspora | Secrets | Turkish German
Year of release: 2005
The film parallels two inter-racial relationships, one between the British Pakistani teenage girl Naseema, from a strict Muslim family. and the white working class boy Adam, from a working class racist family, and that of Naseema's brother Yousif and the white girl Michelle.
Filed under: Black British | Inter-ethnic romance