German-Turkish Identity in Fatih Akin’s Head-On: Transgressing Gender Boundaries, Redefining Home and Belonging

Fatih Akin’s internationally acclaimed film Gegen die Wand/Head-On (2004), one of the key works of contemporary Turkish-German cinema, interrogates and complicates conceptions of homeland, ethnicity and gender. Head-on shows that our sense of home is shaped as much by cultural customs as by the place we live in. Its lead character Sibel (Sibel Kekilli) rejects the home her parents are offering because she finds its religious and cultural customs oppressive and irreconcilable with the liberties she enjoyed growing up in Germany. She moves to Istanbul, where she experiences complete freedom, but also complete isolation and alienation, failing to belong. This chapter analyzes the film’s poignant take on the experiences of young Turkish-German women forced to negotiate conflicting feelings of home and belonging. It argues that at the end of the film, Sibel achieves a self-chosen identity by defining herself not against her family background, but independently from it, and that she does so through role-play and a performance of gender, of different versions of both femininity and masculinity. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the Istanbul location is used in the film to explore the protagonist’s complex relationship with her country of origin, and to illustrate Sibel’s journey towards independence