Thursday, April 3, 2008
Clutching onto a little bit of freedom
In Kleine Freiheit or A Little Bit of Freedom, times are demanding for young Baran, a parentless Kurdish refugee who does bicycle deliveries for a Donner snack bar in the St Pauli district of Hamburg. It is a gritty realistic subculture that filmmaker Yuksel Yavus knows well. Acording to a paper by Denise Goturk, a German professor and scholar at UC Berkeley who has specialized in study of German citizenship and immigration, Yavus came to Hamburg when he was 16 speaking only Kurdish and Turkish. His father worked the shipyards and his mother remained in Turkey. The cinematic authenticity of his immigrant vision bares some resemblance to Scorsese's little Italy.
In Kleine Freiheit Young Baran connects with Chernor, an African also in Germany without papers. Chernor, petty drug dealer who is also gay, is more streetwise than Baran. He does not have the cushion, slight as it may be of a job and some extended family connections that are keeping Baran afloat. The closest Baran has to a father figure is a cousin who works the front counter and is still sometimes cursed by post traumatic stress from the Turkish/Kurdish conflict from the nineties. Over the course of the film, we encounter these characters facing old politics old wounds and old scores not yet settled.
The film is filled with lots of moving camera (sometimes from Baran's point of view or even his bicycle) and longish takes showing life in the snack bar or living quarters. Baran owns a video camera. On it is evidence of family back in Turkey as well as his rrecord of life in Hamburg that he hopes to send to his sister someday. As someday these young men hope not have to be on constant alert for Green and White autos of the Polieze because they will have their papers. At one point Baran chastises Baran for his drug dealing: "Sooner or later, they'll catch you." Please don't chastise me for a spoiler here. Even in early reels, it becomes obvious that Kleine Freiheit is about a tenuous world caving in.
This is not the first film I have seen on the Turkish immigrant experience in Hamburg. I would like to return to Faith Akin's Gegen die Wand (Head On), which impressed me greatly when I saw it nearly three years ago. I wonder if experiencing the tale of Baran will shed additional insight on a second viewing of Akin's film, another tale of a immigrant survival in harsh urban landscape of northern Germany.
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:05 AM
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