Movies to cross borders – LA NACION

The miscegenation, the threads of one, two, and more cultures braided in a work, showing the seams or hiding them but vibrating there, in the mixture, the exchange, the porosity, even the confusion: all, each of those traces, me they can. That may be why I smiled when Mubi uploaded a few films by German filmmaker of Turkish descent Fatih Akin to its platform.

I met this director, like many of us, when it was released in 2004 Against the wall, awarded best film at the Berlin International Film Festival that year. Story of crossed loves, burst and desperate drives –eros and thanatos intertwined between Germany and Turkey–, Against the wall It connected you with something similar to what it generated at the time Love Dogs: the feeling of being faced with a kind of emotional storm. Images, performances and music – the soundtracks in Akin’s films are part of the theme – that made you feel on your skin the indescribable ferocity, the helplessness, of human beings.

“The only reason borders exist is to break them,” he told the newspaper. The country Fatih Akin a few years ago, with the premiere of Crossing the Bridge, a documentary about the musical diversity that is part of everyday life in Istanbul. The truth is that in addition to crossing cultural borders, Fatih Akin displays stylistic versatility. Because if in Against the wall His record was hard and visceral to the point of bordering on tragedy, in Kitchen of the soul (one of the films uploaded by Mubi) appropriates the keys of comedy and makes lightness and intensity are combined elements. There is the display and excess of actors Adam Bousdoukos and Birol Ünel to prove it. The anecdote of Kitchen of the soul leaves the comedy steps visible: there is a boy of Greek origin living in Hamburg who runs, as best he can, a modest food space that he named Soul Kitchen (in allusion to the musical genre rather than the “soul” that appears in the translation of the film title). While he suffers because his girlfriend, German and from a wealthy family, announces that she is leaving for work in Shanghai, he must deal with a brother recently released from prison, the debts that are accumulating, an irascible cook, a waitress squatter and a lot of rock, jazz, hip hop, alcohol and the occasional electronic party in a multicultural city and a time – the film is from 2009 – where the notions of globalization, migrations and mixtures still did not seem to exhale the hint of bitterness that runs through them. day by day.

I already said it: Fatih Akin is versatile. Therefore, in this kind of home cycle organized by Mubi, you can also see The cut, a 2014 film that does not take place in any frenetic European city, but along a path that includes Turkey, Syria, Cuba and the United States. And that does not translate part of the contemporary discomforts and brilliance, but rather looks back in history; specifically, to the tragedy of the Armenian genocide.

In The cut There is no rock or characters overwhelmed by the hedonism, confusion or hunger for meaning of today’s West. The protagonist, played by Tahar Rahim, a French actor of Algerian origin, is a man who suffers the massacre of all his people, manages to survive and, upon discovering that his twin daughters also escaped death, undertakes a stubborn journey to recover them.

Exile, collective displacements, individual miseries and heroisms; borders that move, turn into ashes or are imposed with blood and fire: Akin lets the echoes of the human condition permeate his story without resigning the narrative rhythm; By recovering some events that occurred in the first decades of the 20th century, he speaks about our time without needing stridency or underlining or imposing any pedagogy.