“Exile never ends” looks behind the scenes of one of the many immigrant stories.
Photo: jipfilm
This Thursday the film “Exile never ends”, a documentary film, was released in German-speaking cinemas and won prizes at both the Dok.fest in Munich and the Max Ophüls Film Festival.
Director Bahar Bektaş’s film is a very personal reflection of one’s own family history and the feeling of being homeless, of living in a permanent state of exile or at least feeling that way – and perhaps the most impressive effect of the film is that here you are The story follows a family that appears so astonishingly assimilated and German that you can initially recognize yourself in it, even as a German middle-class child. The three adult children of the Bektaş family speak German with a slight Upper Bavarian accent; two of them, Onur and director Bahar herself, work and keep in touch with their parents. At first glance, a typical middle-class German migrant family.
But the Kurdish-Alevi Bektaş family is not bio-German, as the saying goes. The parents had to flee Turkey from political persecution when the children were small. As we learn, Bahar even had to be looked after by neighbors for a few months as a small child because his father was in prison for left-wing political activities and his mother was busy with work and child care was overloaded.
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Today, the family’s eldest son, Taner, is serving a prison sentence for apparently all sorts of criminal activities and has now applied for his own deportation to Turkey, which, it is hoped, will allow him to be released more quickly. “Exile never ends” primarily shows how the family stands up for Taner, stands by him, wants to help him, is overwhelmed by it and, in the face of the family catastrophe, reflects on their own history and comes together in the process. In the last shot of the film, the mother and two siblings have connected Taner, who is still locked up, via video conference and are sitting on garden chairs on the beach in Turkey. “Taner should see the sea,” says Bahar, and her brother Onur confirms: “Yes, he sees it.”
“Exile never ends” looks behind the scenes of one of the many immigrant stories that disappear in the heated political discussion these days about refugees and deportations and behind figures about criminal foreigners. The documentary also shows that “criminal foreigners” are also people, with relatives who suffer from the situation and who love and miss their brother and son.
The fact that Taner became a criminal, his father argues in the film, has a lot to do with the fact that, although talented and ambitious, he was barely able to cope with the demands of the bourgeois-capitalist ideology of achievement and competition as a refugee child in Germany: “His biggest problem was that he felt inferior. He always wanted to be rich. He didn’t like what he was. He didn’t like his clothes, he had an inferiority complex. He always said he was ashamed to bring friends home. For a father, that sounds like an insult, like an accusation. But we never said anything. He took advantage of people to get rich. He thought he had to do this to get rich.”
This is where the similarities between the autochthonous citizen child experiences and the refugee family end. Instead, we recognize the trauma and identity conflicts that such inferiority experiences bring with them. Taner’s little brother Onur also struggles with this, especially because he also has to deal with ongoing harassment from the German bureaucracy, even though he has a permanent residence permit and has lived in Germany for over 20 years. “To be honest, I don’t give a shit,” Onur once says in a conversation with his sister. »I won’t let them intimidate me. … If they deport me, they deport me, if I can stay there, I’ll stay there. I do not care.”
The film shows the reality of refugees and asylum seekers in Germany unvarnished and thus rather painfully deconstructs the ideology of a welcoming culture and German hospitality. In any case, the Bektaş family learned little about this; on the contrary, mother and daughter report several Nazi attacks on them during their time in a Bavarian asylum seekers’ home.
“Exile never ends” shows dramatically what the experience of flight, rejection and competitive ideology can do, what catastrophe the exclusion of those seeking help causes and how much people suffer from the state of not belonging. Director Bahar Bektaş, who tries to hold the family together in the film and give support and optimism to the two struggling brothers, breaks down at some point and cries uncontrollably. In general, there are a lot of tears in “Exile never ends”.
The fact that the film takes no prisoners, demonstrates the mercilessness of bourgeois society towards its weakest members and shows their suffering mercilessly and in close-up, also makes the work a heavy, sad, but well worth seeing documentary examination of bourgeois ideology.
»Exile never ends«, Germany 2024. Directed and written by Bahar Bektaş. 100 mins. Now in the cinema.
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