Cana Bilir-Meier

It showcases stories of migrants and their descendants in Germany: a monument for a Pakistani poet, the payslips of a Turkish Gastarbeiter, three sisters turning a decolonial gaze on Bavarian history.

Semra Ertan was born in Turkey, 1956 and moved to her parents to the federal republic of Germany in 1972. She worked as a construction draftswomen as well as an interpreter and wrote over 350 poems.1982 Semra Ertan burnt herself in Hamburg to give a sign against racism in Germany.

Shot on Super 8, Cana Bilir-Meier's film portrays a group of migrant teenagers at the Olympia Shopping Center in Munich, where nine young people were killed in a racist attack in 2016. Beside their daily explorations, the teenagers restage scenes from the theater play Düşler Ülkesi (Land of Dreams). The premiere of the play in 1982 was overshadowed by a bomb threat. The contradiction in the film title of wanting to predict the past is a reference to the continuous experience of racism, but can also be read as a playful suggestion to break out of habitual patterns of thought and behavior—conveyed in the film through YouTube comments on Childish Gambino's song Redbone.