Your street
Coordinates: 50 ° 44 ′ 38.2 ″ N , 7 ° 2 ′ 33.1 ″ E
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Your street |
| Country of production | Switzerland |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 2020 |
| length | 7 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Güzin Kar |
| script | Güzin Kar |
| production | Güzin Kar |
| camera | Felix von Muralt |
| cut | Simon Gutknecht |
| occupation | |
| |
Deine Strasse (international title: Your Street ) is a Swiss short film by Güzin Kar from 2020 . The seven-man production is dedicated to Saime Genç (1988–1993). The four-year-old girl of Turkish descent is the youngest victim of a racist arson attack in the west German city of Solingen , in which five people were murdered in May 1993.
The minimalist short film documents the desolation of a street named after Saime, the Saime-Genç-Ring , in the middle of a Bonn industrial park. With your street , the filmmaker wanted to question the culture of remembrance . The work was shown at various film festivals from autumn 2020, including the Berlin International Film Festival . In 2021, Deine Strasse was awarded the Swiss Film Prize.
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The film is shot in the long shot . Shown are images of an inconspicuous street in an almost deserted German industrial area under a cloudy sky. The desolate-looking sequence is complemented by the calmly presented text by a narrator ( Sibylle Berg ). The woman's voice is aimed directly at a four-year-old girl who was killed in a racist arson attack with four family members. It was carried out by an admirer of Adolf Hitler and his friends who lived in the immediate vicinity and who felt disturbed by the noise of the "Turkish children". As a memorial, the 556-meter-long, secluded street was named after the dead child. The narrator describes her street to the girl and describes the circumstances of the crime:
“Five lives, your family, have been wiped out. You had the choice to suffocate, burn, or jump out the window to your death. Children shouldn't make such big decisions. "
According to the narrator, the crime and the victims were forgotten due to similar crimes, although in the meantime people had settled on the street. The girl's identity is only presented to the viewer at the end by a farewell greeting from the narrator, while night falls over the industrial area:
"Sleep well, little Saime."
Finally, an intertitle informs about Saime Genç and the Solingen arson attack.
History of origin
Background and street naming
On the night of May 28-29, 1993, four young right-wing extremists set fire to the house of the Turkish-born Genç family in the North Rhine-Westphalian city of Solingen, 50 kilometers north of Bonn . The 4-year-old Saime Genç died along with four other family members. The girl tried to save herself with her 27-year-old mother Gürsün Ince by jumping out of the window. Both died from the injuries they had suffered. 14 other residents of the two-family house were injured, some seriously. The perpetrators were sentenced to ten to fifteen years in prison by the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court. According to the state security, large parts of the right-wing scene moved from Solingen to neighboring Wuppertal during this time . The city of Solingen reformed its policy on foreigners in the following years.
In the spring of 1998, a street on the ring of the Bonn-West industrial park was named after her in memory of Saime Genç in the Dransdorf district of Bonn. A multicultural “Foreigners Advisory Board” chaired by Rahim Öztürker advocated this. At the end of March 1996, Öztürker had the idea of having street names named after foreign workers who had done a lot for Bonn. The district council followed the initiative. Almost two years later, Öztürker's proposal to name a new road to Saime Genç also received support. The proposal received support from the then Bonn district chairman Herbert Spoelgen and the Green politician Rolf Beu . “We wanted to set an example,” said Spoelgen in 2018. Originally, it was planned to name three streets in the newly built industrial park in Dransdorf after natural scientists for the sake of uniformity.
“The Bonn district council had decided on January 27, 1998 to name it. To this day I unfortunately cannot say why exactly this street was chosen. Perhaps there weren't any other free roads at the time. However, the industrial park was new, so this naming was ultimately possible. The new street was named after the little girl. "
Due to the expensive land prices, the first companies did not settle on the Saime-Genç-Ring until 2002 . Until then, the street name was considered completely unknown and remained so for passers-by for the next ten years. On May 29, 2013, the 20th anniversary of the crime, Bonn's Lord Mayor Jürgen Nimptsch and Safiye Temizel, chairwoman of the city's integration council, inaugurated an additional sign on the Saime-Genç-Ring and commemorated the victims. The sign explains the background to the naming. The list was made in agreement with the Genç family. The arson attack on Saime-Genç-Ring was also commemorated five years later , this time by the city councilor for Dransdorf, Stephan Eickschen.
Motivation for the project and film production
The film director, screenwriter and columnist Güzin Kar , daughter of Turkish immigrants, who grew up in Switzerland , first toyed with the idea of filming the Solingen arson attack in 1994. At this time she began her film studies at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy and was surprised that the racially motivated riots in Hoyerswerda (1991) and Rostock-Lichtenhagen (1992) as well as the right-wing extremist attacks with several dead in Mölln (1992) and Solingen von were not addressed to anyone at the university. It was only in the summer of 2019 that Kar discovered the Saime-Genç-Ring by chance using the online map service Google Maps and remembered the incident again.
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Kar traveled to Bonn for the first time in winter 2019. She walked up and down the street alone for several days, looking for suitable pictures with her smartphone. She put these together with the editor Simon Gutknecht in a wide variety of variations, experimenting with music and sound. In the end, both opted for the most minimalist form from pictures taken in the long shot , while the German-Swiss author Sibylle Berg spoke the text by Kar. The filmmaker later praised her narrator's voice as "unique". According to Kar's own statements, the text was rewritten more than 50 times. After the finished draft for the story, the cameraman Felix von Muralt and Kar returned to Bonn and the last shots followed.
For Kar, Deine Strasse is the first short film since the 29-minute production Paul and Lila (2002). She decided to make a short film in order to be able to experiment with new narrative styles. With the finished film, Kar wanted to question the culture of remembrance . She used an example from Germany to investigate the question of what kind of culture of remembrance a society practices - whom or what should people remember and what should be considered when building memorials? In Kar's opinion, streets “rarely have anything to do with the people to whom they are dedicated”. Still, they would say a lot about who people remember. The Saime-Genç ring is an example of this.
“The more shame and guilty the memory of a person is, the less they are tolerated in the center. Saimes Strasse is on the outskirts, where no one goes to stroll. Tourists should not be frightened with the memory of the murdered child. "
In your street , Kar can take a walk through the town and at the same time focus on the story of the dead girl. It is a "cinematic requiem ". In doing so, she used the term “banality of evil” coined by Hannah Arendt for the film and declared that she deliberately preferred a completely unemotional and value-free narrative. It was expressly not about a projection on the Holocaust or about direct engagement against hatred.
reception
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The film premiered as part of the Winterthur International Short Film Festival, which was staged completely digitally between November 3rd and 8th, 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic . As a result, Deine Strasse was also included in the programs of the online Solothurn Film Festival (January 21–24, 2021) and the industry event of the 71st Berlinale (March 4–5, 2021). Individual critics praised your street , even if the film was not often reviewed until March 2021 (the cinemas were closed due to the pandemic).
The Swiss journalist Michael Sennhauser praised your street as a short film with a long impact. In his Berlinale review, he recalled the anniversary of the right-wing extremist terrorist attack in Hanau (2020) and that such crimes have already been committed more frequently. He also emphasized the calm voice of Sibylle Berg.
Daniel Fuchs ( Aargauer Zeitung ) called the effect of the film “as simple as it is impressive”. Kar's directorial work is "a shocking monument over a monument".
Awards
Deine Strasse competed in the competitions of the International Short Film Festival Winterthur (2020) and the Berlinale (2021), which had to take place online due to the pandemic. When the Swiss Film Prize was awarded in 2021, this was followed by an award in the Best Short Film category .
Web links
- Profile at berlinale.de (including film excerpt)
- Profile at swissfilms.ch
- Profile at henschel-schauspiel.de
- Your street in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Brigitte Papayannakis: Saime Genc - 20 years ago four years old . In: General-Anzeiger (Bonn), May 29, 2013, p. 23.
- ↑ Uwe Schulz: The tragedy of Solingen . In: Welt am Sonntag , May 26, 2013 (accessed from the Nexis Uni database ).
- ↑ Jörg Manhold: Lots of tents, grills and music from all over the world . In: General-Anzeiger (Bonn) , May 18, 1998, p. 6.
- ↑ Beate Müller: 26 673 Bonn residents have a choice on Sunday . In: General-Anzeiger (Bonn), November 6, 1999, p. 7.
- ↑ a b Stefan Knopp: Flowers for the youngest victim . In: General-Anzeiger (Bonn), May 30, 2018, p. 3.
- ↑ A bumpy start in the West Business Park . In: Kölnische Rundschau , June 5, 2002 (accessed via the Wiso presse database ).
- ↑ "Let's be friends" . In: General-Anzeiger (Bonn), May 30, 2013, p. 5.
- ↑ a b c d e f Daniel Fuchs: Stumbled across a street on Google Maps - shot the film . In: Aargauer Zeitung , March 5, 2021, p. 15.
- ↑ a b c English press kit for the film. In: berlinale.de, p. 3 (PDF file, 1.36 MB).
- ↑ Your street . In: swissfilms.ch (accessed on March 31, 2021).
- ↑ Your street . In: solothurnerfilmtage.ch (accessed on March 31, 2021).
- ↑ DEINE STRASSE by Güzin Kar (Berlinale 2021, shorts) . In: sennhausersfilmblog.ch, March 4, 2021 (accessed March 31, 2021).
- ↑ Matthias Lerf: Great triumph for " little sister" . In: Tagesanzeiger , March 27, 2021, p. 18.