Mona (Dileyla Agirman) is the only one in the class who stands up when she is picked on.
Photo: Stephan Burchardt/DCM
It’s really difficult with German entertainment films. If you want to make something that’s a bit edgy, that has a few irresolvable contradictions, that perhaps questions something, then the funding looks bad. Nobody wants to see it, it’s too inaccessible, nobody understands it, so it doesn’t bring in any money. If an entertainment film is supported, especially a children’s or young adult film, you can almost be sure that something with a state-supporting message will come out of it, and a few established clichés will be celebrated so that the masses flock to the cinema.
In the program announcement, this year’s opening film in the Berlinale’s Generation section, “Being a Winner”, by director Soleen Yusef initially sounds like the first category, which doesn’t actually exist in children’s films: a difficult topic (escape, trauma, integration), a protagonist who is for the masses are not suitable as identification figures. Unfortunately, after just a few minutes, “Being a winner” turns out to be a prime example of the second category (indicator: rich support). And apparently it doesn’t work without virtue terror. Same here: Anyone who achieves something gets recognition; Anyone who works in the group has understood life – the main character Mona (great, like the entire children’s cast, and therefore a plus point for the film: Dileyla Agirman) sums this up well with her credo: »Only teamwork makes the dream work! “ Oof.
Mona fled Rojava and is now at a school in Berlin-Wedding. She is funny, smart and plays soccer well; her heroine is her aunt Helin (Hêvîn Tekin), one of Rojava’s brave resistance fighters. A promising character sketch – but then Mona arrives in everyday school life and now the narrative goes rapidly downhill. The teacher Che (Andreas Döhler in his usual pleasant bluntness) in a leather vest and with a star earring (apparently the parade uniform of all fighters for justice) makes big speeches in the teachers’ room about equal opportunities and tolerance, but corrects the grammar of his zero in an arrogant old schoolboy manner. Bock students and can also denigrate them in a tour for their indiscipline. That doesn’t make any sense front or back.
He sees Mona as a great football talent, just the right person for the school’s girls’ team. There, Mona first has to fight for a place among the many alpha girls, but because she is willing to perform, unlike the other vulgar wedding cliché children, she makes it straight into the regular lineup.
But the worst of the film is when Mona gives a monologue in the classroom about the value of democracy after the students have vandalized the school (“Others are dying for this!”). Everything she says may be true, but at this point it becomes clear who this film is actually made for: not for those it’s about, but again the well-dressed, always full of healthy food, foreign language-savvy white woman Normal clients and their children are allowed to make a little fun of those down there because it’s all so exaggerated and ironic, and at the same time they don’t feel disturbed in their serious normality.
If you really want to learn something about everyday school life in so-called problem neighborhoods, you shouldn’t watch films made in Germany. Documentaries are miles superior in this subject (they are even funnier), as “Mr. Bachmann and his Class”, “Princess Baths” or “Favoriten” (also shown at this year’s Berlinale) prove.
“Being a Winner”, Germany 2024. Director and screenplay: Soleen Yusef. With: Dileyla Agirman, Andreas Döhler, Sherine Ciara Merai. 119 min. Dates: February 22nd, 11 a.m., Cineplex Titania.
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