“Yunan” – the island in us

Asthmatics know what it is like to suddenly no longer get any air. The fear of having to suffocate always remains present. But Munir, a Syrian author living in exile in exile, has no asthma, its bronchi and the lungs, the examination shows, are completely healthy.

Then why does he always get these suffocation attacks? Apparently there is a “reasonless sadness” in him, which suddenly overwhelms him. He is in the end of 40 and no more beginner, neither in life nor when writing. Nevertheless, it is completely tight. Maybe he had to experience bad things that torture him? Certainly, but no more than other exile.

The Syrian director Ameer Fakher Eldin, who also wrote the script, is about existential questions. What is home in the globalized world? This elegiac film, in which politics is never mentioned, has a similar self-made gesture, as he found in the documentary filmmaker Thomas Heise, who died last year, who found his cinematic family chronicle under a heading by his father Wolfgang Heise, the GDR- Philosophers, stated: “Home is a room from time.”

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I now also recognize this space-time context in Ameer Fakher Eldin’s “Yunan”, the second part of his “Homeland trilogy”. The first part “Al Garib” (“Der Stranger”) from 2021 already caused a stir, on third he is already working. In fact, the consequence is astonishing with which this director tells the history of Munir in a deep life crisis – silent like a film by Andrej Tarkowski, without fear of aesthetic stylization and an almost philosophical voice gesture and the long swivel by cameraman Ronald Planned over landscape, sea and Heaven. This film stands across the hasty zeitgeist, is slowly progressing and dispenses with all short -handle migration debates. Amazing also the international production community, which made this film possible, consisting of Germany, Canada, Italy, Palestine, Qatar, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Is that the new international cineaste international?

It is good that the fate of Munir is not linked to domestic debates. That would have been a different film in any case. Munir is played by Lebanese actor Georges Khabbaz, who, in his disturbing distant tongue, – interrupted only by a single dance – wears the film from the first to the last minute. How little do we know about actors in Lebanon, and Khabbaz has already received international film prizes. He is also an impressive personality beyond the screen, works as a writer, musician, comedian and professor of theater art. At the age of four he was on a stage for the first time in Lebanon, in the play “The Life of Saint Maron”.

Munir has obviously reached a low point. Nothing is moving here in Hamburg, he says to his sister in Syria on the phone. She cares for the old mother. When he speaks to her and reminds her that he was her son, she replies that she couldn’t be that she was still a young girl who has everything in front of her. The mother lives, but forgot him!

This falls into a picture must that threatens to tear him. Are they characters from his novel, where he just wrote, the silent shepherd and his beautiful wife? Or do memories from his childhood appear that mix with his dreams? We hear the sentence several times: “He returned to the place he had never left.” He remembers. But the fear is there to forget everything yourself and finally be forgotten by everyone else. Is he going crazy now?

Amazing the international production community, which made this film possible. Is that the new international cineaste international?

The doctor had advised him to take a break, to drive somewhere. He now does that, after he has convinced himself that all the words have been lost and that he can no longer write anything. First the author dies, then the man? No, first his mother’s child, which he is still.

It looks like a cinematic meditation on the Vanitas texts of the baroque poet Andreas Gryphius, who carried the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War: “The world is too tight here,/ a tight grave is too far.” Munir does not believe to be able to live more on; He has a pistol in his pocket, which is always bad, but especially when you are an Arab exilant – and he drives the ship to the Halligen in the North Sea.

The landlady Valeska awaits him in the only on -site inn, or more precisely, she doesn’t expect him because he has not reserved. It is a reunion with the great Fassbinder actress Hanna Schygulla as a landlady who may be as old as Munir’s mother in Syria. And seems as strict as it is facing. He just shouldn’t breathe so deep when he gets suffocation fits: “You don’t need that much air.” That actually helps him. Then there is a flood, the highest in a long time. You move together on this rough night, the camera immerses us in the stormy black of loud water. And Munir suddenly feels something in himself: life?

He dreams of his mother, who tells him that he does not need to be afraid, not of life and not of death – and also not that imagination and reality constantly mix with him. He was not crazy, he was a writer, he would be poor on it without powerful dreams.

Does the island become a trap or refuge? Both are possible. The flood flows off the next morning, and life, with cows, damp meadows and Munir, who grabs his bag, seems to go again.

“Yunan”, Germany/Canada/Italy/Palestine/Katar/Jordan/Saudi Arabia 2025. Director and book: Ameer Fakher Eldin. With: Georges Khabbaz, Hanna Schygulla, Ali Suliman, Sibel Kekilli, 124 min.
February 21, 6 p.m., Haus der Berliner Festival; February 23, 12.30 p.m. Zoo-Palast 1