Formation of Identity from an Outsider Perspective: National and Personal Identities in Films of Fatih Akin and Anna Melikian

The German-Turkish director Fatih Akin and the Armenian-Russian Anna Melikian represent a new wave of successful young European filmmakers. Their works capture intermediate results of the quest for national identity that began in Germany and Russia after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 respectively. This thesis offers a comparative analysis of Akin’s In July (2000) and Head-On (2004) and Melikian’s Mars (2004) and Mermaid (2007) and explores how issues of identity and its key categories including gender, sexuality and ethnicity are treated in each of these works. The goal of the thesis is to look into how the historical cataclysms toward the end of the 20th century affected perceptions of national and personal identity, and how these changes were then reflected in the German and Russian “outsider” cinema of the 2000s