Towards a cinema of cultural hybridity: Turkish-German filmmakers and the representation of alterity

This article considers the development of “Turkish-German cinema” and situates it in relation to the attempts by filmmakers associated with the New German Cinema to represent the experience of migrants in the Federal Republic. These films were frequently criticised for reducing their protagonists to stereotypes, portraying the migrant as victim and focusing excessively on conflict of an intercultural or intracultural kind. The 1990s saw the emergence of a younger generation of Turkish directors in Germany intent on breaking away from this “cinema of the affected” by not foregrounding the problematicisation of alterity. The article examines the work of two of these directors, Fatih Akin and Thomas Arslan, and assesses their success in representing “life in, as well as between, two cultures”