Director's Portrait:
Fatih Akin - The Sun Is As Much Mine As The Night
Fatih Akin
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Fatih Akin was born in Hamburg in 1973, and lives and works in the city's Altona district, the setting for several of his films. In 1993, his career began as an actor playing smaller roles in cinema and television films until 1995, when he presented his regular production company (Wueste Film) with Sensin, his first short film as an author and director. He attended the Hamburg College of the Arts, and while shooting the short Weed (Getuerkt, 1996) he continued to work on the screenplay for Short Sharp Shock (Kurz und schmerzlos, 1998). This drama marked the beginning of his career, bringing immediate success and several awards, including the famous Adolf Grimme Award, two nominations for the German Film Awards and the Bronze Leopard at Locarno. It was followed in 2000 by the road movie In July (Im Juli, 2000), filmed with an international team in Germany, Hungary, Romania and Turkey. Festival successes in Norway, France, Italy and even Canada and Los Angeles - where Akin's films each received audience awards - were evidence of the young director's ability to communicate with an international audience. The one-hour documentary Wir haben vergessen zurueckzukehren (2001) is a TV production in which Akin tells the story of his parents, who came to Germany with the first wave of immigrants from Turkey during the sixties. In this way he prepared the field for his next feature film, that led him to the far south of Italy in 2001 - in many respects the story Solino (2002) corresponds to Akin's own biography. It is about two brothers, the children of Italian «guest workers», who grow up in Germany and struggle for success and happiness. Solino was also nominated for this year's German Film Award. In his film Gegen die Wand, due to start in German cinemas at the beginning of 2004, the director and author returns to his own somber beginnings. Nonetheless, this love story beginning in a psychiatric institution and ending on the Bosphorus, is - or so Akin believes - evidence of an important development in his stories: «I have become wiser, somehow, and part of that is that the heroes of this film don't die. The two lovers go on living, and that's the main thing!»
Agent: La Gente - Agentur fuer Regie, Drehbuch & Kamera Bei den Muehren 70 20457 Hamburg/Germany phone +49-40-38 61 14 05 · fax +49-40-38 61 14 06  info@la-gente-agentur.de www.la-gente.agentur.de
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Sometimes it can be very useful to judge a person by his appearance: when, almost exactly ten years ago, Fatih Akin took his first «screenplay» to the Hamburg film production company Wueste, his school notebook full of illegibly scribbled text was almost certainly less attractive than his own radiant self-assurance. A smile on his face - half storyteller from Thousand and One Nights, half cool rap-artist from south west Hamburg - he announced his step-by-step aims: «I imagine things rather like Rocky. First I write a screenplay, and then I can play the main role myself!»
Today the determined filmmaker's balance is four feature films, two short films, a documentary and a college certificate - he has now left acting behind him and proved that, as a director, he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time: his dark, tragic first film centered around three children of immigrants who stray onto the wrong path and become involved in weapon dealing - Short Sharp Shock, the screenplay from the school notebook - brought international awards for both the director and the actors. Nevertheless, in the period that followed he did not allow himself to become tied to either drama or comedy, directing a love story with the road movie In July and historical material with Solino: «The sun is as much mine as the night, laughter as much as tears," he says, and for the German film scene - bogged down as it was in fun movies - he came as something like a breath of fresh air. The period of shallow stories finally came to an end in the mid-nineties. Having just been nominated for the 2003 German Film Awards, Akin commented: «The scene here has altered a lot since I began making films. It has become much stronger, now there is something like an identity. Berlin films ..., Hamburg films ... All at once you know: Hey, you really have to make an effort to keep up with things!»
Born in Germany as the son of Turkish parents, the 30-year-old director is a child of globalization: like the musician Manu Chao, he samples and remixes elements from a diversity of cultures, material easily available to his generation for the first time. «We grew up with the video recorder - and my great role models were not from Europe. Neo-Realism or Film Noir, that didn't come until later. In the beginning I was really keen on American cinema: love, violence, action, simply good stories!» And making films enabled him to approach his own roots and arrive at the insight that tradition need not mean just raking in the ashes: «I was lucky, I had the opportunity to work in Turkey and to get to know the country in that way. We German-Turks are like aliens for those over there in Turkey. So we have to keep on going over there and examining our own history. We can learn a lot and then make it into something new.»
And perhaps it is somehow because of his oriental heritage that his films are so successful with audiences: Akin always tells people's stories, and he has no fear of emotions, however great they may be. Whether people blinded by friendship, brothers who have become enemies or fateful encounters - all his heroes go to extremes, just like their inventor: «They are looking for a better life, that's what we have in common. That moment when you no longer say 'I was happy then' and start to say 'I am happy now'.»
When his next film means that the «traveling circus» starts again - the expression Akin uses to describe the way his team grows together, playing backgammon during the breaks and achieving the impossible while shooting - the challenge will be: better filmmaking is also a better life - and each time it is an experiment with fortune. Now he will be embarking on his first collaboration with a US production company from Los Angeles. It is to be a feature film, a vampire film, the fifth film by the German-Turk who bears exactly the right name for international competition - for «Fatih» means «the conqueror».