Fatih Akin: I know where I belong

German filmmaker Fatih Akin talks about his latest, Rhinegold, which had its premiere at the Red Sea Film Festival
Image Courtesy: Red Sea International Film Festival
Image Courtesy: Red Sea International Film Festival

Fatih Akin went missing during the introduction to his new film Rhinegold at its maiden screening at the Red Sea Film Festival. He was catching another movie at the same venue—Vox Cinema at Jeddah’s Red Sea Mall—informed Kaleem Aftab, the festival’s director of international programming, who moderated a post-film discussion with the German filmmaker on what looks likely to be his most successful film at the home box office till date.

According to Variety, Rhinegold, that released in Germany on October 27, has grossed over 10 million dollars. In a brief one-to-one with Akin the next day, I start off by asking him about the film that had kept him busy the last evening while we had been in the grips of his Rhinegold. Pan Nalin’s The Last Film Show, the Indian entry to the Oscars this year, which is also competing in the second edition of the festival in Jeddah; a film he loved. “I am in the Academy… It was on my list [of films to watch],” says Akin. 

Born in Hamburg to Turkish parents, Akin made a sensational, Martin Scorsese-inspired debut in 1998 with Short Sharp Shock about three young immigrants and their tryst with crime and gang fights that won the Bronze Leopard at the Locarno International Film  Festival. The big recognition at home came with an ill-fated romance Head On in 2004 when it won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. About a relationship that liberates two individuals yet binds them in further chains, Akin calls Head On “the strongest love story” and “my tribute to Turkish cinema”. It led on to a more complex and tangled examination of tenuous immigrant lives and cross-cultural issues in The Edge of Heaven (2007), which won the best screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival. Akin explored German-Turkish relations through food in Soul Kitchen (2009) and came up with the Golden Globe winning disruptive and disturbing terror and revenge saga In the Fade in 2017.

Courtesy of Red Sea International Film Festival
Courtesy of Red Sea International Film Festival

Akin’s eleventh feature, Rhinegold, is about the life and crimes of an Iranian-Kurdish immigrant and popular rapper Giwar Hajabi aka Xatar played by Moroccan actor Emilio Sakraya. A mix of several genres—gangster drama, heist, musical, comedy—it moves back and forth in time through various locales, from a revolutionary Iran of the late 70s (where Xatar’s father was a classical composer) to the contemporary Syrian prison where Xatar is being tortured for gold. “We had over 100 sets and locations and a cast of 120 actors and yet we had to wrap up the film fast,” says Akin of one of his most ambitious projects till date. It abounds in populist tropes and is entertaining for that. “I always try to be accessible. I always try to reach a wide audience even when I do something like In The Fade. I wish I could have as many people as possible to see my films,” says Akin.

He thinks that Rhinegold could be a gamechanger, given the fact that cinema right now is in a fragile state, and nobody believed that his new film would work the magic that it has. The odds were stacked heavily against it. “It is not a comedy. It is long. It has a lot of violence. It can’t be seen by people below the age of 16. Yet it brought in over a million admissions,” he says. It is a reaffirmation for him that things can work and that there is an audience for films and that filmmakers like him can keep movies alive and not necessarily have to move to the streaming platforms, as is the growing trend these days. He doesn’t want to go for the streamers because, for him, they are nothing more than television. “It’s another sort of television. It’s nothing new. It's not cinema. By saying that I don't mean it's bad. I'm not judging it. But I came into this game to make films. If I must do television to feed my family, if I must do television because I have no other choice, then I’d do it. But if I have the choice, then I will always go for films. That's my thing,” he says.

Rhinegold’s success is also making him think anew in other ways. For an intuitive filmmaker, who wouldn’t think twice before starting off on a project, who’d make films driven by his gut instinct than the box office mathematics, a more considered, thought through and planned approach to filmmaking could well be the future: “Now that I am able to understand why it worked and how it worked, can I make things work again?”

He feels that film is too expensive a medium; too much of a luxury to take chances with. He also thinks the audience for it is changing and a filmmaker like him must take cognisance of this altered reality: “I'm not the Beatles. I don't do a film that the audience would buy anyhow. People who were watching my films 10 or 15 years ago, have become older and don't go into the movie theatres as they used to do. There's another generation of young people, my children’s age. I want to reach out to them.” His cast for the film (with his actor-wife Monique Obermuller as the casting director) was just as young. “For most of them it was their first film. I am now nearing 50. They made me remember what it was like to work in my first film when I would have been their age. They made me feel younger,” he says. 

Courtesy of Red Sea International Film Festival
Courtesy of Red Sea International Film Festival

While people are comparing Rhinegold to early Guy Ritchie movies, its mix of genres and blend of emotions is also very reminiscent of popular Indian films. “I see that as a compliment, says Akin adding, “I have tried to study the phenomenon of the Indian cinema culture… What is it that we don’t have? What is it that your films have? And what can I get from them?” The protagonist—an underdog, street lumpen, who rises all the way up—Xatar could well be Amitabh “Vijay” Bachchan of the 70s and 80s Indian cinema. There’s the riches-to-rags and back-to-riches story and populist lines strewn all over the narrative. It's a terrible tale, but with a fairytale ending. Akin prefers to call it mythology than a fairytale. “Rhinegold is this famous opera, based on this very famous German mythology. It’s the German holy cow, a very German thing. What we have done now as immigrants is like [we have stated that] we are the new Germans, and we are now the new German mythology,” says Akin of the canny appropriation.

So how has this issue of immigration and hyphenated identity then evolved for him as an individual and filmmaker though his life and works? Where does Rhinegold place it now? Pat comes the answer: “It's not an issue. But it took a while to understand it because the Western press gives you this kind of stigma. People try to brainwash you [into believing that] you don't know where you belong… It is such a cliché… But you know what, I know pretty darn well where I belong.” Touche!

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