Töchter zweier Welten

Summary

Daughters of Two Worlds

Two women, a mother and her daughter, talk about the challenges of different cultures and generations. Seriban came to Germany as a "guest worker" with her daughter; her husband arrived later. Daughter Meral is now 24 and works as a hairdresser. Unlike her mother, she does not follow the traditions of Turkish culture. Not least of all because she had to flee a hellish arranged marriage and ended up in a women's shelter.

Both women describe – one in Turkish, the other in German – their life between the two cultures as an inner dichotomy, "basically, you don't know where you belong". In a parallel sequence, the film compacts the two women's differing views of life into a dialogue between mother and daughter that never actually took place. Director Serap Berrakkarasu met her two subjects when she worked at a women's shelter in Lübeck. She says, "the young Turkish women here were pretty isolated. I wanted to show the girls and women that they weren't all alone with their problems. The parents are not monsters. You can understand them; they were shaped by their own upbringing".

Source: 69. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)