half-lives and head-on collisions: turkish cinema across borders

A new Turkish-German documentary film focuses on the lives of gays, lesbians, and trans people in İstanbul: Yarım Hayatlar/Halbes Leben/Half a Life "offers five personal stories of Turkish queers who do not want to hide any longer." As the synopsis points out, Turkey is one of the most liberal of countries in the Middle East when it comes to sexuality, at least in legal terms. But outside of relatively progessive circles and districts in a few major cities (including the neighborhood where I lived in İstanbul) visibility is limited, and open declaration and acceptance of queer identities is rare. According to the İstanbul metroblog, the film has not yet been released in Turkey.

Yarım Hayatlar is part of an emerging mini-genre of transnational Turkish cinema, the product of young filmmakers from immigrant communities in Europe and of international projects by directors like the Rome-based Ferzan Ozpetek, whose 1997 film Hamam was an Italian-Turkish-Spanish collaboration. The most influential film of the recent wave is Fatih Akin's stunning Gegen die Wand/Duvara Karşi ("Against the Wall," screened in the US/UK as "Head On"), about Turkish-German immigrants in Hamburg. A friend of mine called it "the first truly modern Turkish film," and it prompted this outbreak of breathless enthusiasm from Anthony Lane (the often-surly New Yorker film critic):

All I can say is that you should see “Head On,” and that, even if you end up hating it, there will be no denying the fact that you have been through something and that, if you are still foolish and hopeful enough to let movies get to you, the person who went into the theatre will not be quite the same as the person who comes out.

It's a strange, broken love story about two people who end up saving each other, set to an incredible soundtrack of German punk rock and Turkish traditional song. All manner of border-crossing abounds, from the physical, as the film moves from Germany to the shores of the Bosphorus and back, to the sociolinguistic--the characters' jarring code-switching between Turkish and German functions as a sort of verbal metaphor for displacement and hybidity. Undoubtedly the most extraordinary film I've seen in the last two years.