lâl (more turkish-german cinema)

Several short films from the ongoing New York Film Festival are available for viewing on the NYT website (see "Watch Short Films" in the movies section.) One of them is a German-Turkish co-production called Lâl ("ruby"). It provides an interesting juxtaposition to the expanding genre of Turkish-German cinema I wrote about earlier, because it tells the story not of the Turkish immigrant community in Germany, but of a German immigrant to Turkey, who lives and works in İstanbul and speaks fluent Turkish, and whose possibly half-Turkish daughter is practically a foreigner to her. The typical tale of migration and uprootnedness is inverted and turned upside-down. On a more personal note, several scenes from the film were shot very close to where I live at the moment.