10 DIASPORA
Head On Fatih Akin (2005) Turkey and Germany
Bhaji on the Beach Gurinder Chadha (1993) United Kingdom
The Small Axe Series Steve McQueen (2020)
Akin, Fatih. Gegen die Wand= Head On. Arte Bavaria Film International Strand Releasing Timebandits Films 2005.
People migrate. The term Diaspora was traditionally used for the dispersion of Jewish people all over the world, but it can be used to indicate how people leave their homeland and become part of other cultures. There are 11 million Turks living in Germany. They are part of the National Identity. But until the year 2000, German citizenship was not by blood not birth. A child born in Germany was not a German citizen unless they were born to German parents. Generations of Turks lived in Germany and never gained citizenship.
The United Kingdom conferred citizen ship on anyone born in a British Colony, but this did not protect them from racism. Gurinder Chadha’s film Bhaji on the Beach tells the story of Indian migrants in London in the 1990s.
Steve McQueen’s anthology film series, Small Axe, presents the experiences of West Indian migrants in London from the 1960’s to the 1980s in five films made for BBC One and Distributed by Amazon Prime.
Turkiye Cumhuriyeti, The Republic of Turkey, is a democratic, secular nation that spans Europe and Asia. Istanbul sits on the Bosphorus, a peninsula in Europe, in the Sea of Marmara. Anatolia, the large land mass that comprises the rest of Turkey is in Asia. The capital, Ankara is in Anatolia.
75% of people in Turkey consider themselves to be Turks, but there are Greeks, Kurds, Armenians and Jews in Turkey. Much of Ancient Greece was in Turkey. Homer, the blind Poet that wrote The Illiad about the conquest of Troy, likely lived on the West Coast of Turkey. Troy was a walled city in Northwest Turkey. The land of early Christianity, Asia Minor, including the inhabitants of cities where Saint Paul wrote his letters: the Collossians, the Phillippians, the Philadelphians, were in what is now Turkey. The capital of the Holy Roman Empire was Constantinople, now it is called Istanbul.
Head On, the German title is Gegen die Wand, Against the Wall, tells the story of Turkish gastarbeiters, guest workers, immigrants who come to Germany to do menial work.
In the film, two Turks meet after they have attempted to commit suicide and decide to get married. The girl wants to marry to escape the control of her family. He has nothing to lose. It’s a redemption story.
The German Turkish Alliance was solidified in 1914 with the rise of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk helped the Turks win the Battle of Gallipoli, then he transitioned Turkey from a feudal empire to a 20th Century republic. He was president from 1923-1938. He abolished the Caliphate and ended Sharia Law and the veiling of women. He developed a public school system for boys and girls. In 1928, he changed the official written language of Turkish so that it is written in a Roman Alphabet rather than in Arabic Script.
Bhaji on the Beach
Gurinder Chadha was born in Kenya under British Colonialism, she is of Indian, Sikh descent. She was raised in England. When Chadha’s family moved to London, they experienced racism. Her father wore a turban and had a beard and was unable to work as a banker, so their family ran a store. They were not considered British in the same way that Brits of Anglo-Saxon descent are.
She made her first Documentary film “I’m British, but…” in 1989. She’s made 20 films, including shorts and documentaries, and she directs a British television show called Beecham House. Chadha’s work as a filmmaker deals with the contradictions or identity and the strain of living under the traditions of Indian and Sikh culture is cosmopolitan London, especially the Sikh tradition of arranged marriage.
Chadha was named the most prolific female director working in Britain by the British Film Institute.