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Birol Ünel's Head-On co-star Sibel Kekilli was spotted in a Cologne mall.
“I once had a Turkish girlfriend, a ‘good buddy’ type, who asked me to enter into a sham marriage with her,” admits Akin, “I told her I wouldn’t, but the idea never let go of me. I thought it would make a cool plot. In the first version I wrote years ago, it was a comedy. After all, the point of departure is a classic comedy situation.
“Then Birol Ünel entered my life. I was totally fascinated by him, like when you’re spellbound by guys like Kurt Cobain and James Dean - guys who destroy themselves, who are so brilliant and talented that nothing else matters to them in life.”
And so the story changed from a comedy of misunderstanding to a story about self-destruction. The comedy lingers on in the film, though - in Sibel’s initial proposal to Cahit (running after him in the clinic, she says ‘Hey! Are you Turkish? Will you marry me?”) and in the strained meeting with her parents.
“Tragedy is much more painful when comedy runs through it,” says Akin. “At the beginning of the film, Cahit is a dead man, a zombie. Later, he’s awakened to life when Sibel kisses him - that gives him enormous strength. But every form of energy that has something positive about it also has something negative, possessive. Wars have been fought for this. Love is simply a force that comes towards you, and the film is about this force. That’s why it’s a love story.”
Head-On is produced by Stefan Schubert and Ralph Schwingel of Hamburg’s Wüste Filmproduktion, who have worked with Akin on every film since his debut short, Sensin’… You’re the One! (Sensin’… Du bist es!) in 1995. “We just have faith in Fatih,” says Schwingel. “We regard this film as the conclusion and the climax of our long-term association with him.”
Co-produced with Hamburg-based broadcaster NDR and pan-European TV station Arte, together with Akin’s own newly formed production company, Corazón International, Head-On was shot in Hamburg and Istanbul by veteran cinematographer Rainer Klausmann, who began his career on Werner Herzog’s epic Fitzcarraldo, and previously worked with Akin on Solino.
The director always knew that Istanbul - where Sibel flees when Cahit is jailed and her father really does disown her, burning photographs of her in the kitchen sink - was going to be a major part of the film. “Istanbul is occupying a bigger and bigger place in my life,” he says. “To me, it’s the Holy City and Babylon at the same time. It’s a city full of contradictions; a wild place, a dangerous and very exhausting city. It is the city for me - the ultimate setting for such a story.”
For Cahit, too, his ‘Turkishness’ gets stronger as he grows older. Ünel was born in Turkey, came to Germany with his parents when he was seven, and didn’t speak a word of German until he was 10. Growing up in the Berlin Turkish quarter of Kreuzberg, he began to develop an interest in acting, and went on to a successful stage career before appearing in his first film, the Tony Curtis-starrer, The Passenger - Welcome to Germany, in 1988.
With a reputation for being a wild man, Ünel seems to belong in Akin’s edgy films - in the early shorts and features, then in the romantic road movie Im Juli (2000), finally as the lead in Head-On. “Birol is little like a crazy brother to me,” says the director. “I am a big fan of his.”
Casting Sibel was not quite so straightforward. The actress had to be able to speak and look Turkish. But that wasn’t all. “There aren’t that many young women who speak Turkish fluently and are ready to get undressed in front of the camera,” as producer Schwingel bluntly puts it. And Head-On requires her not only to get undressed, but also to appear in a number of fairly graphic sex scenes.
The production looked at several leading German-Turkish actresses, before spotting 22-year-old Sibel Kekilli in a shopping mall in Cologne. She went through an audition process with 250 other hopefuls. “She had the balls to take on Birol,” says Akin, “and the ambition to do it. Very early on, she made a remark: ‘If I do something, I do it right’. And I thought, Sure, that’s just talk. Today, I know it wasn’t just talk. She did it right. I always said that she was a godsend - that’s how I see her.”
Having already stirred up controversy in Germany, not least within the Turkish community, Head-On recently became a hot issue in the local film industry as well, when distributor timebandits - a joint venture between Wüste Filmproduktion and Berlin production house Egoli Tossell - decided to bring forward the release date to capitalise both on the Golden Bear and the controversy. It opened there on March 11, one of the first films to receive free publicity on television under Germany’s new film law.
Akin, meanwhile, who has been hearing reports from sales agent Bavaria Film International during the Berlinale of closed deals with Turkey, Italy, Spain, Benelux, Scandinavia (and, after the American Film Market, of Japan and the US, where it will be handled by Strand Releasing), has had enough of controversy for a while.
“Head-On was the most exhausting film I’ve ever made,” he says. “The next one will be much smaller and more harmless. I feel it’s dangerous to try to top yourself after such a film. That will come when the time is ripe - or it won’t come at all! But I shouldn’t - I can’t - rest on my laurels. That would be fatal.”
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HEAD-ON
Bavaria Film International present a Wüste Film
production in co-production with Corazón International and NDR/Arte
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Original title: Gegen die Wand
Prod: Ralph Schwingel, Stefan Schubert; Co-prod: Fatih Akin, Andreas Thiel, Mehmet Kurtulus; Dir/Scr: Fatih Akin; Ph: Rainer Klausmann; Prod des: Tamo Kunz; Cost des: Katrin Aschendorf; Ed: Andrew Bird; Casting: Mai Seck; Mus: Klaus Maeck.
With Birol Ünel (Cahit), Sibel Kekilli (Sibel), Catrin Striebeck (Maren), Güven Kiraç (Seref), Meltem Cumbul (Selma), Cem Akin (Yilmaz Güner), Aysel Iscan (Birsen Güner), Demir Gökgöl (Yunus Güner), Stefan Gebelhoff (Nico), Hermann Lause (Dr Schiller), Adam Bousdoukos (Lukas), Ralph Misske (Ammer), Mehmet Kurtulus (Hüseyin).
International distribution: Bavaria Film International.
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