Head-On

Fatih Akin's Head-On (Gegen die Wand) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival 2004, the first German film to take the Berlinale's top prize in eighteen years, and the European Film Award for Best Film. It established Akin, then thirty-one, as one of the most distinctive Turkish-German directors of his generation; The Edge of Heaven (2007) and In the Fade (2017) followed, along with a long international filmography.

Two Turkish-Germans meet in a Hamburg psychiatric ward after separate suicide attempts: Cahit Tomruk (Birol Ünel), a self-destructive alcoholic in his forties, largely estranged from his community, and Sibel Güner (Sibel Kekilli, in her debut), a young woman desperate to escape her family's conservative stranglehold. Sibel proposes a marriage of convenience. Cahit will give her the Turkish husband that lets her leave her family, and the two will live separately while keeping up appearances.

Akin directs with a physical urgency rare in European cinema of the early 2000s: long passages scored to punk rock and Turkish folk, Rainer Klausmann's jagged, restless camerawork, and two lead performances of unusual physical commitment. It became one of the most important films of post-millennial Turkish-German cinema, and it is still a reference point whenever European films about the immigrant second generation come up. Kekilli's performance launched a German and English-language television career (Game of Thrones, Tatort).