Shirins Hochzeit

Guest worker stories rarely tell of single women. In the early 1970s, the reserved Shirin flees from a forced marriage in her central Anatolian village to look for her beloved in Cologne. After the initial culture shock, she quickly makes friends in a hostel for migrant workers and finds work in a factory. But soon a wave of redundancies and the futile search for her Mahmut pushes her increasingly to the margins of society. As a migrant woman, Shirin becomes a victim of patriarchal (class) systems on several occasions. The first broadcast of the feature film on German television triggered massive protests from Turkish right-wing nationalist circles, and the director and leading actress were subsequently under police protection for several months. (Bianca Jasmina Rauch)