Kreuzberg director Ayşe Polat: Berlinale debut with “In the blind spot”

When Ayşe Polat says that she is “in the game” again, there is a good dose of irony in the undertone. To stay with the metaphor, the Berlin director is not really a player. In conversation, she seems calm and speaks quietly – but firmly. Unfortunately, this has often turned out to be a disadvantage for Polat in recent years. Because the “game” in which she plays is called “German Film”, and it usually had a very specific profile for a director with the first name Ayşe.

Polat appeared on the scene towards the end of the 1990s in the short wave of so-called German-Turkish cinema around Fatih Akin, Thomas Arslan and Züli Aladag. All children of Turkish immigrant families – and the first generation to grow up in Germany. With “Short and painless” (Akin), “Geschwister” (Arslan) and “Auslandstournee” (Polat), the young German-Turkish film became an important point of reference for turning away from the “migrant cinema” of the eighties, in the wake of Tevfik Baser’s “ 40 sqm Germany”. The hyphen in “German-Turkish” now suggested belonging, but the exclusion still subtly resonated.

Ayşe Polat, who won the Silver in Locarno in 2004 with her second feature film “En Garde”, the coming-of-age story about a teenage girl on an orphanage odyssey Leoparden has always felt uncomfortable with this label. If you ask her about it, she makes it clear: “I spent the first eight years of my life in Turkey. But I think in German, I dream in German. I am a German filmmaker with Alevi-Kurdish roots.”

How complicated it is to deal with one’s origins, that this always remains part of the individual experience, but one’s own identity still has many other facets, is shown in a fascinating way in Polat’s fifth feature film “In the Blind Spot”, which premieres in the Encounters series has. For the director, her Berlinale debut feels like a return.

“After the award for “En Garde” it was surprisingly difficult to get funding,” says Polat at the meeting in a Kreuzberg restaurant not far from her apartment. “I felt reduced to the post-migrant filmmaker again. I had to shoot my last two films without funding because I wanted to continue to pursue my passion without compromise. If I had to, I would have filmed on my cell phone.”

Psychic gift or legitimate paranoia?

Ayşe Polat has repeatedly proven that a “German filmmaker with Alevi-Kurdish roots” can talk about her origins and a post-migrant experience in Germany without automatically placing this at the center of her films. With “Im toten Winkel” she even leaves Germany completely behind, even if her film covers an invisible trail: in the character of the German documentary filmmaker who is shooting a report in Turkey on the mothers of disappeared young men.

“In Istanbul,” Polat explains the starting point of her film, “I met the ‘Saturday mothers’ who meet every Saturday near Taksim Square with photos of their sons who have disappeared or been killed. I was moved by the sight because the women, their calls for attention, acted like a wound in the busy street.”

A few years ago, Polat made “The Others,” a documentary about trauma, the Kurds’ role in the genocide of the Armenians more than a hundred years ago. With “Im dead angle” she now had something else in mind: a thriller and ghost story. “The atmosphere gets you much closer to the core of the issue, that sense of loss and guilt,” she says.

The focus of the three episodes is Melek, who is about ten years old and whose father works for the Turkish secret police. The girl may have a psychic gift or an imaginary friend. But it could also be that the erratic point-of-view shots that encircle people like an invisible force are simply the result of a growing state of paranoia.

“In each chapter, the images have a different function,” explains Polat. “They correspond with each other. The first chapter is still documentary, in the second the mobile phone dominates and in the last a surveillance aesthetic predominates. The uncertainty in the images is slowly increasing.” The question of who is actually looking, the ambivalence of the gaze is the central motif of your film.

German film still takes too few risks

According to Polat, one problem with German film is that it doesn’t take enough risks. You could also say that he didn’t have a particularly strong idea of ​​cinema. It is all the more astonishing what Ayşe Polat has managed to do with “In the Blind Spot” after ten years of abstinence: a political film that plays with the visual media that surround us every day. “I’m concerned with the representability of trauma,” she explains. “How do you capture what is in the blind spot of our media perception? And what tension arises between what is shown and what happens outside of the shot?” The genre of the paranoia film basically “came to me” as if of its own accord.

“I see myself as a political person,” says Polat about her way of working. “But I have no political mission. My films are personal first. In my work I am always concerned with the topic of injustice, also in relation to social background. Or the cultural sector.” All the more astonishing how relaxed Ayşe Polat talks about her work: without a trace of bitterness.

“In the Blind Spot” is the film of a director who has always stayed true to herself. This impression runs like a red thread through her narrow but precise work – whether for television or for the cinema. She has just filmed her second “Tatort”. Polat’s persistence seems to have paid off. It is only logical that she was invited to the Encounters competition with “Im toten Winkel” as the German entry.

At the end you want to know if she has any idea what needs to happen in the German film industry so that other female directors don’t have the same experiences as her. Polat replies that a lot has changed for the better in recent years. Above all, the people at the control points are important. “Diversity doesn’t just mean recasting a few roles in films. Even the selection of films, from funding to the distribution program to festivals, is a political act.” Ayşe Polat himself experienced how narrow this bottleneck is.

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