Immigration has provoked plenty of European film. American cinema is rife with migration stories too but, where America's founding myths are premised on in-migration, European countries have historically been depicted as sources of emigration rather than hosts to immigrants.
Such portrayals defy Europe's geo-political location near – and its historical role as a colonizer in – the Middle East and North Africa. With so many immigrants from the Muslim world lured to Europe in the 20th century, filmmakers have made scores of films about secular Europe's encounters with “immigrant Islam.”
The volume of such films spiked after the events of September 11, 2001, with filmmakers, more or less politically engaged and of various aesthetic sensibilities and abilities, drawing upon immigrant stories to inform a wide range of work – from social realism to commercial and art house fare.
Many films appear to be made with pedagogical goals in mind, specifically to dispel the mass media's, oftentimes crude, representations of Muslims. It's not difficult to place Burhan Qurbani's “Shahada” (“Faith”) within this category. One of three German-speaking films to compete for the Golden Bear at the Berlinale's 60th edition, “Shahada” makes an effort to speak to popular audiences. Unfortunately the film wasn't very convincing for the Berlinale's jury, as it emerged unscathed by prizes.
The film follows the stories of three clusters of characters. All live in proximity to Berlin's Muslim community, ranging from secular to devout.
Maryam (Maryam Zaree) walks into the frame while meeting her girlfriend Renan (Nora Abdel-Maksoud) for a night at an after-hours nightclub. Secular herself, Maryam lives with her widowed father Vedat (Vedat Erincin), the tolerant and humane imam of a local mosque. Though the imam is Turkish, his mosque caters to Muslims from all over the world.
Pregnant by the thuggish Sinan (Burak Yigit), and wanting to avoid the public humiliation of going to the hospital, Maryam has turned to Renan to help her abort the unwanted foetus. The medication causes a miscarriage while the girls are clubbing and she continues to haemorrhage the next day.
Afraid to go to either the hospital or her father for help, she begs God to “just make [the bleeding] stop.” Sliding from despair to delirium, Maryam gradually mutates from a fun-loving rebel to a crazed, hate-filled fundamentalist.
The secular Ismail (Carlo Ljubek), meanwhile, is a Turkish police detective happily married to Sarah (Anne Ratte-Polle). He's racked with guilt for having accidentally killed the unborn child of Leyla (Marija Skaricic), an illegal immigrant with whom he strayed into adulterous relations. He's reformed his ways when the film opens, but, weighed down by anguish and desire, he leaves his secular wife and son for Muslim Leyla.
The son of a Nigerian immigrant, Sammi (Jeremias Acheampong) is a devout Muslim who works in a food-processing facility with his mother and the redneck Sinan. The three also attend the same mosque, the one presided over by Vedat.
At work, Sinan amuses himself by abusing Sammi's openly gay pal Daniel (Sergej Moya) and Sammi must routinely come to Daniel's assistance. Sammi is gay too, it turns out, and his relations with Daniel provoke a spiral of self-loathing and inner turmoil.
“Shahada” is not quite the German answer to “Coronation Street” that this sketch suggests. Clearly, though, the decision of Qurbani (and his co-writer Ole Giec) to have the ensemble cast navigate its way through such emotionally fraught waters does give the film a patina of television melodrama.
This is Qurbani's first feature-length film, it being his graduation project from the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. A child of Afghan migrants, the writer-director has described his first feature as an “attempt at reconciling the contradictions of the two cultures I grew up in. To see the German and the Islamic parts of me combine on film.”
He also evinces a desire to do this with as little didacticism as possible, focusing instead on his characters' stories. This explains his decision to work with melodrama. Distasteful as the form is for some audiences, melodrama is of great utility for filmmakers wanting to reach a popular audience with a message – here, that German Muslims are human beings, not indecipherable ghouls.
Given the tenor of the films that took prizes at this year's Berlinale – the Golden Bear went to “Honey,” a sumptuously shot, quietly acted, utterly apolitical art house film by Turkey's Semih Kaplanoglu – it's not really surprising that “Shahada” was excluded from the winners' circle.
The cinematography of Yoshi Heimrath is workmanlike, compared to the other films in the competition, but it's more than adequate for TV, where the film will likely find purchase.
