Exile Never Ends

Director: Bahar Bektaş 
Almanya, 2024, 99’, DCP, color 
Turkish, German with Turkish, English subtitles 

Bahar´s brother Taner is serving in prison in Germany and is about to be deported to Turkey. Bahar uses the time of waiting for her brother´s deportation to hold the camera on her family members. She explores the family’s emotional and geographical worlds of uprooting and new beginnings between Germany and Turkey in calm and sensitive imagery. With this film, Bahar claims a territory for her family while being squeezed between two countries and a state of in-between. 

In conversations with her parents Yıldız and Mustafa, as well as her brothers Taner and Onur, she embarks on a painful journey into the past. Political persecution of the Alevi-Kurdish family in Turkey, the flight to Europe in 1989, several racist attacks, depression and overburdening of the parents – all this affected the children, who deal with it in different ways. The uncertainty of Taner´s fate in Turkey is just the mirror of their life experience as a family in exile. The distortion of past and presence and different geographies confront the audience with one of the attributes of exile, which is losingthe orientation in time and space. 

The crew will attend.