Berlinale: Fuck you, CV | nd-aktuell.de

There’s a quote at the beginning that says you should decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not the idea of ​​you. Only someone like James Baldwin could say a sentence like that. The search for his own identity was his life’s theme. This is how the main character Hazal (Melia Kara) feels in Aslı Özarslan’s feature film debut “Ellbogen” based on the novel of the same name by Fatma Aydemir, but not quite as poetically.

Hazal wouldn’t talk about worlds and ideas, she would say, “Fuck you,” but she and Baldwin mean the same thing. Hazal grows up in Wedding in Berlin and is taught from every side that she is actually not good the way she is. Her application for a training position fails because she supposedly has too little general education, whatever that is supposed to be; In the drugstore she is frisked by the store detective, even though she hasn’t done anything, because he wants to boost his statistics and no one will ask stupid questions about a girl like her. Her mother makes it clear to her that she thinks she is a loser (unlike her sister, who is studying).

You have to develop a lot of self-confidence if you want to cope in this context. To make matters worse, Hazal and her friends are turned away at the club door on Hazal’s 18th birthday. The drama comes to a head when the girls then meet an aggressive guy at the subway station who hits on the three of them with a sexist-racist bullshit.

In general, Hazal would like to dissolve, which materializes in one of the best scenes in the film, in which she writes her CV on the computer and the autocorrect turns her Turkish last name into the word “Agenda”.

Director Özarslan shows an angry young woman whose energy is fed by dozens, if not hundreds, of micro and macro injuries that her short life has already inflicted on her. The constant pressure that the family and the racist class society put on her culminates in explosive violence that is shocking to the outside world, which is not the product of a single provocation, but has its origins in the many humiliations that this young woman had to experience.

In desperation, she looks for an anchor, a place of longing where she can start over, and flees to Istanbul to a guy she has only known from video chats. Everything is supposed to feel easier here, but Özarslan stages the arrival in the new surroundings in such a way that you gradually discover that this is a fallacy. She takes up the ambiguity of migration biographies, and so Hazal notices quite clearly that she is the “German” in Turkey, who also has no idea about the political circumstances in Turkey. Kurdish question? State terror? Never heard. “I don’t need to know, you don’t know everything either,” is Hazal’s defiant reaction to her roommate’s condescending manner, and Hazal is right.

Özarslan’s production of this perplexed and restless young woman is not always easy to access; some scenes end abruptly or begin without context. This Hazal is not suitable as a person to be liked, and you don’t feel sorry for her either, which is one of the film’s strengths, because the director leaves the main character completely to herself and forbids her from making any gesture of sacrifice.

For a youth film, “Ellbogen” is extremely demanding and very unforgiving. In the end, the protagonist just gives us a look brimming with pride, and we are finally left alone with our desire for a story that we can somehow hold on to.

But that’s just how good films are, they throw us back on ourselves. In this respect, “Ellbogen” stands in stark contrast to some films that are also shown in the Berlinale’s Generation section and deal with the theme of the identity of children and young people beyond the white majority society. In “Being a Winner,” a girl who has fled from Syria looks for and finds her place in Wedding (again) because she can adapt quite well – in contrast to Hazal.

“Elbow”, Germany 2024. Director: Aslı Özarslan. Starring: Melia Kara, Jamilah Bagdach, Asya Utku. 86 min. Next and last date: February 25th, 7 p.m., HKW 1/Miriam Makeba Auditorium.