Almanya - Welcome to Germany

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Movie
Original title Almanya - Welcome to Germany
Almanya Logo.jpg
Country of production Germany
original language German , Turkish
Publishing year 2011
length 101 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
JMK 6
Rod
Director Yasemin Shamdereli
script Nesrin Şamdereli ,
Yasemin Şamdereli
production Annie Brunner ,
Andreas Richter ,
Ursula Woerner
for Roxy Film
music Gerd Baumann
camera Ngo The Chau
cut Andrea Mertens
occupation

Almanya - Willkommen in Deutschland is a German feature film from 2011 . The tragic comedy addresses the question of the homeland and identity of Turkish guest workers in Germany over several generations. The film debut of the sisters Yasemin and Nesrin Şamdereli was invited to the competition program of the Berlinale 2011 , where it was out of competition. Almanya opened in German cinemas on March 10th and was the fourth most successful German film in 2011 with around 1.5 million visitors. At the German Film Prize 2011 the film received the award for the best screenplay and the silver prize in the competition for the best film.

action

Six-year-old Cenk Yılmaz asked himself the question of his identity when he was not elected to the Turkish or German football team in his German school. As the son of Ali of Turkish origin and his German wife Gabi, he does not speak Turkish. At a family celebration, his grandmother Fatma announces his recent naturalization in Germany, and grandfather Hüseyin explains that he has bought a house in his home village in Turkey that he would like to use as a summer residence. In order to renovate it, he decides that the entire family will go there for the holidays.

At the same time as the general storyline, 22-year-old Canan tells her cousin Cenk the story of her young grandfather in short episodes. He fell in love with Fatma from the neighboring village, kidnapped her and married her, and then came back as 1,000,001 during the labor shortage in the 1960s. Guest workers to Germany. After a while he brought his wife and children Veli, Muhamed and Leyla from his home village to Almanya . Full of prejudices and everyone with their own dreams and expectations of the foreign country, the family had to struggle with numerous difficulties in finding their way into the unknown language, culture and way of life. Finally, the fourth child, Ali, was born and completed the young family.

Now the extended family flies to Turkey and sets off in a minibus to Hüseyin's home village in eastern Anatolia to visit the newly built house. During the long journey, the personal circumstances and problems of the family members become apparent. Hüseyin recently received an invitation to an official thank-you event for guest workers at Bellevue Palace , where he is supposed to give a speech in the presence of Chancellor Angela Merkel , and is thinking about how to deal with it. Fatma actually no longer wants to live in Turkey and disapproves of Hüseyin's house purchase. Veli's wife wants to get a divorce, Leyla only smokes secretly for reasons of propriety and Muhamed has lost his job. Canan has a British boyfriend without her mother Leyla's knowledge and is also pregnant by him. Hüseyin guesses Canan's pregnancy and responds with understanding.

Hüseyin suddenly dies on the way. Since he was last a German citizen, the Turkish authorities refuse to be buried in an Islamic cemetery. The family therefore brings his body to his village and buries him in home soil. Cenk sees his relatives at their current age and their younger counterparts from the time they immigrated in the 1960s gathered around the grave.

The house bought by Hüseyin turns out to be a ruin. Muhamed decides to stay in the village and rebuild it. The rest of the family returns to Germany. Finally, little Cenk gives the speech that Hüseyin had prepared before Chancellor Merkel.

background

Almanya is after Who dies earlier is longer dead is the second film by the Munich-based production company Roxy Film, which was newly formed in 2001 . Preparations for production took about seven years and were repeatedly delayed due to difficulties in financing. The makers had to contend with reservations about the topic and competition from films like Solino (2002) and Kebab Connection (2005), which saturated the market for cross-cultural comedies. After years no television company was ready to join the project as a partner, Herbert Kloiber's Tele München Gruppe finally took over twenty percent of the total budget of around four million euros.

About 50 script versions have been edited over the years. The authors let their own experiences and anecdotes from their circle of friends flow in. The shooting took place from October 8 to December 16, 2009 in Izmir and the surrounding area ( Turkey ) and then in Munich and the surrounding area. In Schleissheim Palace a reception at the German dignitaries was filmed. In the Bahnpark Augsburg and at the Augsburg-Oberhausen train station, the scenes of the arrival in Germany in 1964 were created with 100 extras. In Munich- Freimann on the autobahn, there was a settlement in which Germany in the 1960s could be shown. The old congress hall of Messe München served as an airport in a flashback. As a cinematic means of showing the helplessness of the guest workers, the Germans speak and sing incomprehensible gibberish in some flashbacks.

The actor in Cenk is Rafael Koussouris, who was born in Munich in 2002 . He is German with Greek roots. Both his grandfather and his mother worked for Bavarian television . For Almanya he stood in front of the camera for the first time. He got the role after a casting that his parents learned about through the school secretary.

publication

Germany

The premiere in the competition program of the Berlinale took place on February 12, 2011 in the presence of Federal President Christian Wulff in the Berlinale Palast . On March 10, the film started in 209 German cinemas, with a Turkish version of the film appearing in addition to the German version. On the first weekend, Almanya reached number five on the cinema charts as the best newcomer with around 130,000 visitors. The film was able to improve to third place the following weekend and, with more than 300 copies in the meantime, stayed in the top five of the ranking for six weekends. After another four weeks in the top ten, more than a million cinema tickets for the film had been sold. From the theatrical release, the film was in the top ten of the German cinema charts for 13 consecutive weekends. In April, May and June 2011 Almanya was the front runner for six weeks in the art house cinema charts of the companies united in the working group Kino - Gilde deutscher Filmkunsttheater . In April 2011, Almanya was number three of the most-watched films in German cinemas with over 500,000 viewers. By the end of 2011 there were around 1.43 million viewers in Germany and by the end of 2013, after more visitors came through performances during the school cinema weeks, the number totaled 1,502,548. In the second and third year since publication, Almanya was thus listed among the 100 most-visited German films.

The free TV premiere was on May 21, 2013 on Sat.1 . The film reached a total of 2.76 million viewers and a market share of 9.3 percent. The 1.57 million 14- to 49-year-old viewers made up a high market share of 13.8 percent for the station.

International

In Austria, Almanya - Willkommen in Deutschland started at number 7 in the cinema charts on May 13th and reached over 48,000 viewers by the end of the year. In German-speaking Switzerland, the film entered the charts at number 6 on May 19, 2011. The cinema release in Turkey under the title Almanya'ya Hoşgeldiniz was on November 4, 2011, but audience interest in the homeland of the Yilmaz family remained low.

Almanya had the greatest attendance outside Germany in the other guest worker country, Italy, where around 170,000 visitors were reached after the start on December 8, 2011. In 2012 there were cinema releases in Spain (March 23, 28,500 visitors) and France (May 30, 44,500 visitors). The world distributor Beta Cinema also reported rights sales to Israel, Benelux, Greece, South Korea and Taiwan.

Festivals

After the premiere at the Berlinale, the film was shown at other festivals around the world. In Great Britain it was screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2011. Almanya had its North American premiere at the 2011 Seattle International Film Festival , where the film was screened in the competition for young directors and was voted one of the festival's ten best films by viewers. Yasemin Şamdereli reached fourth place in the audience vote for the festival's best director, in which over 450 films were shown. In Asia, Almanya was screened for the first time in the Focus Germany series of the Shanghai International Film Festival 2011. The film was shown at several festivals organized by the Goethe-Institut and German Films around the world and in 2013 it was part of the program of the first German Film Week of the Goethe-Institut in North Korea . At the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2011, Almanya was part of the series Ten Euro Directors to Watch curated by critics from Variety magazine . As another A festival after Berlin, Shanghai and Karlovy Vary, the World Film Festival Montréal 2011 showed the film in the Focus on World Cinema series .

Disk

DVD and Blu-ray Disc of the film were released in Germany on October 13, 2011. In addition to the German and Turkish language versions, there is an audio commentary by the filmmakers who explain the background to the origins of the respective film scenes. Extras include almost eight minutes of missing scenes, interviews, a short demonstration of the visual effects used and a ten-minute B-roll with video recordings of the shooting.

Gerd Baumann's soundtrack has been available on CD since March 11, 2011.

reception

At a presentation by Concorde to a specialist audience during the Munich Film Week in January 2011, Almanya was received "with enthusiasm". Even before the premiere, the film was pre-selected for the German Film Prize 2011. At the premiere during the Berlinale 2011, the film received enthusiastic applause and “repeated applause and laughter”. The presentation in the main program of the Berlinale brought the film a lot of media attention, including international ones. It was often judged to be successful and was given names such as "happily moving integration fairy tale". For the German-Turkish relationship, Almanya is doing something similar to everything on sugar! for the German-Jewish and Good Bye, Lenin! for the East German-West German relationship.

On March 25, 2011, Yasemin (above) and Nesrin Şamdereli (below) were invited to the NDR Talk Show on the occasion of the success of their film .
Nesrin Şamdereli

Aside from some praise for the cast and the timing of their play, many critics mentioned the movie's comedy. The Şamdereli sisters "blow [...] all the clichés that exist on the subject of German Turks like soap bubbles, only to burst them with relish." Epd Film found the gags known, but still original, was sometimes about unoriginal conflicts, characters and Stereotypes the speech. Bonds in the US road movie Little Miss Sunshine from 2006 were found on various occasions . Partly referred to as unsentimental, the end of the film was too sentimental and forgiving for most of the critics, made to “full sweet”, a “painless family entertainment” in which the focus on the child causes the inner turmoil of the middle adult generation to be forgotten. He said he didn't hurt anyone with his superficial joke and showed no ambition for deepening.

In the Tagesspiegel and in the Süddeutsche Zeitung the conclusion was that one could accuse the film of transfiguration and evasion of occasional problems such as honor killings and radical Islamism, but it is beneficial to watch a comedy about normal, well-integrated immigrants instead of a difficult problematic film. This view, “a joyful and liberating one”, is new in the cinema, said Jan Schulz-Ojala in the Tagesspiegel . The film is well attended “because it hits a nerve; because it combines a longing with an experience. ”According to Susan Vahabzadeh ( Süddeutsche Zeitung ), a darker comedy might be necessary, but it would be unfair to accuse Almanya , because happily she reminds her“ that there are also immigrants for whom the integration problem is essential is more strange than sauerkraut. ”Parvin Sadigh von der Zeit found the comedy“ healing, [...] because it breaks away from the entrenched opinions of the integration debate ”. The immigrants "didn't worry about their successful or unsuccessful integration."

Awards

Almanya - Willkommen in Deutschland received the Silver Film Prize in the Best Film category at the 2011 German Film Prize . Yasemin and Nesrin Şamdereli received the German Film Award for Best Screenplay . As one of three German films, Almanya was included in the list of 45 films from which the nominations for the European Film Prize 2011 were selected. At the German Film Critics' Prize 2011, Yasemin Şamdereli received the award for the best feature film debut, both sisters were honored for the screenplay. The film was also nominated in the categories of best film, best music and best editing.

Further awards

literature

conversation

Scientific contributions

  • Christine Arendt: Cultural Identity and Film Narratology in “Almanya. Welcome to Germany ”and didactic implications for GFL lessons. In: Tina Welke, Renate Faistauer (Hrsg.): Immersion in other worlds. Diversity of aesthetic texts in the context of German as a foreign language and German as a second language. Praesens Verlag, Vienna 2019, pp. 61–86.

Review mirror

positive

Rather positive

Mixed

Rather negative

  • Ray , No. 5/2011, p. 46, by Harald Mühlbayer: Almanya - Welcome to Germany

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for Almanya - Welcome to Germany . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , December 2010 (PDF; test number: 125 840 K).
  2. ↑ Age rating for Almanya - Welcome to Germany . Youth Media Commission .
  3. ↑ Competition of the 61st Berlinale (PDF; 82 kB), accessed on January 18, 2011
  4. ↑ a b Film hit list: Annual list national 2011 (PDF; 232 kB), Filmförderungsanstalt , accessed on February 25, 2016
  5. ↑ Josef Engels in an interview with Yasemin and Nesrin Samdereli: On Turkish prejudices against Germans . In: Welt online from February 14, 2011
  6. ↑ Christopher Keil: How ARD and ZDF missed the film 'Almanya'. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of April 4, 2011
  7. ↑ a b c Press booklet of the Concorde film distribution
  8. ↑ Shooting Report in the BR telecast Cinema Cinema February 10, 2010
  9. ↑ Melanie Steck: The long journey to integration. In: Augsburger Allgemeine . November 23, 2009, accessed October 6, 2015 .
  10. ↑ a b Enthusiastic applause for immigrant comedy , dpa report from February 12, 2011
  11. ^ German cinema charts: Königswetter , Blickpunkt: Film accessed on March 14, 2011
  12. ↑ Kinocharts Woche 11/2011 , Kino.de , accessed on March 23, 2011
  13. ↑ Almanya - Welcome to Germany: Weekend Charts of Germany , Blickpunkt: Film , accessed on May 17, 2011
  14. ^ Arthouse cinema charts: "Almanya" for the fifth , Blickpunkt: Film , accessed on May 17, 2011
  15. ↑ Film hit list: April 2011 (PDF; 343 kB), Filmförderungsanstalt , accessed on February 28, 2016
  16. ↑ National annual hit list 2013 (PDF; 225 kB), Filmförderungsanstalt , accessed on February 28, 2016
  17. ↑ Alexander Krei: Sat.1: “Almanya” success does not help Meyer and Strunz. In: DWDL.de of May 22, 2013, accessed on May 23, 2013.
  18. ↑ Guler Alkan: "If it doesn't come to an honor killing". derstandard.at of May 11, 2011, accessed on February 28, 2016
  19. ↑ Top 10 - Austria , accessed on June 14, 2011
  20. ↑ a b c d e Almanya - Welcome to Germany in the Lumiere database of film attendance figures in Europe, accessed on May 23, 2013.
  21. ↑ Not looking for problems with a magnifying glass , Tagesanzeiger.ch of May 16, 2011, accessed on May 17, 2011
  22. ^ The Swiss cinema charts - week from May 19 , 2011 to May 25 , 2011, accessed on June 14, 2011
  23. ↑ Almanya'ya Hoşgeldiniz at gazetevatan.com, accessed on November 12, 2011
  24. ↑ Almanya - Welcome to Germany at Box Office Mojo ( Memento from November 9, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  25. ↑ Beta Cinema inks over 35 deals at the EFM, February 22, 2011, accessed December 23, 2012
  26. ↑ Beta Cinema returns from Cannes with impressive number of sales , May 27, 2011, accessed December 23, 2012
  27. ^ Almanya - Welcome to Germany , accessed on June 26, 2011
  28. ↑ SIFF Announces Film Competition Lineups For 2011 Festival ( Memento from November 9, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  29. ↑ 37th Seattle International Film Festival Wraps With 2011 Golden Space Needle Awards ( memento of March 16, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  30. ↑ Two German productions in competition at the 14th Shanghai International Film Festival. In: filmportal.de . German Film Institute , June 9, 2011, accessed December 24, 2016 .
  31. ↑ November 5th, 2013: Goethe-Institut opens German Film Week in Pyongyang. In: goethe.de. Retrieved February 28, 2016 .
  32. ↑ Euro helmers on the rise . In: Variety. June 26, 2011, accessed May 11, 2019 .
  33. ^ John DeFore: Almanya: Welcome To Germany (Almanya: Willkommen In Deutschland): Film Review. In: hollywoodreporter.com , August 26, 2011, accessed February 28, 2016
  34. ↑ Concorde: With a lot of tailwind into the new cinema year. In: Blickpunkt: Film . January 13, 2011, accessed on January 14, 2011 : "The enthusiastically received 'Almanya' by the successful producers of 'Who dies earlier is longer dead' was honored in great detail at the tradeshow."
  35. ↑ The preselection for the German Film Prize 2011 (PDF; 125 kB) ( Memento from February 28, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  36. ↑ a b Elmar Krekeler: Turks can see integration so funny! In: Welt online from February 13, 2011
  37. ↑ Harald Martenstein: Identity issues. In: Der Tagesspiegel from February 13, 2011
  38. ↑ a b c d Susan Vahabzadeh: Christmas for everyone! . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 11, 2011, p. 12
  39. ↑ a b c d Barbara Schweizerhof: Fine gag material . In: Die tageszeitung , March 5, 2011, p. 22
  40. ↑ a b c Andreas Kilb: Hidden object with tinsel . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , March 10, 2011, p. 32
  41. ↑ a b c Ralf Blau: Almanya - Welcome to Germany . In: Cinema No. 3/2011, p. 40
  42. ↑ Christian Buß: With the donkey to the economic miracle . In: Spiegel Online , February 12, 2011
  43. ↑ a b David Siems: Almanya - Welcome to Germany . In: epd Film No. 3/2011, p. 45
  44. ↑ a b Harald Mühlbayer: Almanya - Welcome to Germany . In: Ray , No. 5/2011, p. 46
  45. ↑ Alex Todorov: Critique of Almanya - Welcome to Germany. In: Filmstarts , accessed December 20, 2012
  46. ↑ Claire Horst: Migration and Integration - once completely different. In: kino-zeit.de, accessed on December 20, 2012
  47. ^ A b Jan Schulz-Ojala: Migrants like us . In: Der Tagesspiegel , March 9, 2011, p. 21
  48. ↑ Alexandra Wach: Almanya - Welcome to Germany . In: film-dienst No. 5/2011, p. 31
  49. ↑ Parvin Sadigh: Integration for Laughter . In: Die Zeit , March 9, 2011
  50. ^ Three Germans selected for Film Prize , Welt Online , accessed on September 13, 2011
  51. ^ Prize of the German Film Critics 2011 . Association of German Film Critics, accessed on May 11, 2019 .
  52. ↑ Report of the German Film and Media Assessment
  53. ↑ Winner Children's Media Prize The White Elephant ( Memento from February 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  54. ↑ 'Tomboy' Wins Odessa International Film Festival. hollywoodreporter.com on July 23, 2011, accessed December 4, 2011
  55. ^ "The Artist" & "Almanya" Take Home Audience Prizes at 47th Chicago International Film Festival. indiewire.com on October 24, 2011, accessed December 4, 2011
  56. ↑ 48th Uluslararası Antalya Altın Portakal Film Festivali ( Memento from November 19, 2011 in the Internet Archive )