ABSTRACT
Fatih Akın, a German filmmaker of Turkish descent, gained international spotlight when his 2004 feature Gegen die wand (Head On) won the Golden Bear Award at the Berlinale Film Festival. The award triggered significant debate in popular and scholarly venues concerning how best to categorize the films made by Turkish directors from Germany: is new German cinema Turkish? 1 In the case of Akın, as film historian Nezih Erdoğan confirms, what has troubled the popular imagination and scholarly interest is the “double consciousness” of Akın, “a diasporic Turk living and working in Germany, his transnational existence as a filmmaker and his contested national and cultural belonging” (27). Appealing to the director’s cultural “in-betweenness,” however, much of the reception surrounding Akın figured him in a role of native informancy, in fact, symptomatic of the identitarian thinking that dominates the discussions of multiculturalism in the European Union (EU) and the wider persistence of essentialisms used to define the borders of home and elsewhere. 2
