En Garde

Tatort is a long-running German/Austrian/Swiss crime television series set in various parts of these countries. The show is broadcast on the channels of ARD in Germany, ORF in Austria and SF1 in Switzerland.

A film crew from Germany, filming in a remote village in northeastern Turkey, interviews an elderly Kurdish woman. She performs an ancient ritual to keep alive the memory of the son she lost years ago. The young woman, who helps the German crew with the Kurdish translation, is also the caretaker of seven-year-old Melek. Melek's father is a member of a shadowy organization whose true purpose is unclear. The result of all these people coming together will be devastating.

Luks Glück is a tragicomedy about the dubious happiness of a Turkish family between Hamburg and Istanbul, whose life by a lottery win out of joint.

Hülya is a young German-Turkish writer. Several years after the death of her father, she decides to write a novel about him. In order to get to know him better, she travels to Damal, the place where her father was born and grew up. She meets the people from his youth and reconstructs his life there - at school, at home and in the expansive landscape around the village. While she observes, she does not always get an equally positive picture of her father and the dramatic events that shaped his life and hers. Confusing memories fall into place. At the same time, present, past, reality and fantasy start mingling increasingly naturally and it becomes more and more clear that memory is a far-from-infallible instrument. Nature, idyllically one time and mercilessly next, forms the atmospheric decor for this reflection on the value of family bonds, love and honour.

The Kurdish province Van is famous for its unique cats, which are the cultural symbol of the Kurds, Turks and the Armenians. Van was the historical home of the Armenians until 1915 - the year of the genocide. Nowadays all that remains are the ruins of countless churches and a small number of inhabitants with Armenian roots, though most of them are scared to admit this. The 34-year-old Ali speaks openly about his Armenian grandmother Piroze. He accompanies us through the world of the residents, one that is filled with taboos, distrust and fear. The film tracks down the traces of this cruel history and shows that, "the past is never dead, it is not even past." (W.Faulkner)

An experimental short fiction film about Kemal Altun, a Turkish asylum seeker who threw himself out of the window of a West Berlin courtroom in 1983 at the age of 23 out of fear of being deported. Altun's situation is related to that of the writer Georg Büchner. Büchner died of typhus in 1837, during his lonely Zurich exile, where he was on the run from the Hessian authorities. What did Büchner think at the end of his long persecution? What did Altun feel on the eve of his suicide, his ultimate freedom?