Fatih Akin: Winning Awards and Making Enemies

Hamburg born director Fatih Akin’s film about the Armenian Genocide “The Cut” premiered in Germany at the Hamburg Film Festival on September 27, 2014. The Festival also bestowed its lifetime achievement honor, the Douglas Sirk Award, to Akin, who has become one of the most influential art house directors of his generation, both in Germany and in Turkey. Previous winners of the prize include Tilda Swinton, Korean director Kim Ki-duk and German filmmaker Andreas Dresen.

In an exclusive interview on CivilNet, Akin said that he had kept the news about his film “The Cut” low profile for years until it was ready to screen this past August during the 71st Venice Film Festival. However, he has recently faced the explosiveness of the topic in his own Turkish community in Germany. “Old friends no longer greet me on the street even though they have not seen the film,” Akin said on Radio Germany. He has made arrangements for increased security precautions for at least one year.

“I always had a great fear and experienced a taboo whenever the subject was about the mass killings of Armenians,” the filmmaker said on Radio Germany. Akin has experienced his first confrontation with the “hysterical defense of the Turkish attitude” on this subject. “The Cut” is now released and it will serve as an opportunity for an open and freer discussion about the Genocide, he said.

Akin’s debut feature film, “Short Sharp Shock” of 1998 was about a Greek-Turkish friendship in Germany. His international breakthrough came in 2004 with “Head-On,” which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. His follow-up, “The Edge of Heaven,” premiered in Cannes in 2007 and won the prize for best screenplay. Both “Head-On” and “The Edge of Heaven” are part of Akin’s “love, death and the devil” trilogy, which were completed with his latest film about the Armenian Genocide, “The Cut.” Set 100 years ago during the Armenian Genocide, Tahar Rahim stars as a man struck mute by war who journeys across the world on a desperate search for his twin daughters.

“The Cut” will also premiere at the opening of the 36th Cairo Film Festival in mid-November, 2014, in addition to premiere screenings in London, Zurich, Moscow, Toronto, Los Angeles, Paris and other cities in the next few months.