Serpil Turhan's grandparents gave up Kurdish for Turkish, the village for the big city. Her mother then gave up Turkish for German and Istanbul for Berlin. In her film, the director carefully collects fragments of a family marked by migration.

The mother has not been to the Kurdish village her family comes from for 30 years. She thanks her daughter, director Serpil Turhan, for making the journey. She had filmed her grandparents there in the summer and thus laid the foundation for this film about three generations of her family. It is thanks to Turhan's careful conversational style that a safe space is created for the narratives about diverse, also painful memories of migration and life experiences that span an arc from the village to Istanbul and on to Berlin. The languages one grew up with, learned or forgot in the course of one's life play a special role. The family history could also be told through the different intersections of Kurdish, Turkish and German available to the generations. The film title, which describes the loss of the mother tongue, also refers to this. Serpil Turhan balances her different roles as daughter, granddaughter and filmmaker with great assurance. Thus, an intimate project becomes an exemplary story at the same time.

https://www.berlinale.de/de/programm/programm/detail.html?film_id=202213948
https://www.berlinale.de/de/news-themen/news/detail_119375.html

The director will be present for a talk at the Delphi Filmpalast on 15 February.

Dilim dönmüyor - Meine Zunge dreht sich nicht. Germany 2013
by Serpil Turhan

Serpil Turhan
Born in 1979 in West Berlin. She starred in several films by Thomas Arslan and Rudolf Thome from 1997 to 2005 and studied theatre studies and media art/film at the HfG Karlsruhe. She is now a representative professor in the Media Art/Film programme at the HfG Karlsruhe. Since 2010, she has made four documentaries, including Rudolf Thome - Überall Blumen (Forum 2017).