Films by Serap Berrakkarasu

TÖCHTER ZWEIER WELTEN (Daughters of Two Worlds), Serap Berrakkarasu, FRG 1990, DCP, OV/EnS, 60 min
Sep 2, 2021 22:00 Open air cinema at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (at Arsenal Cinema if poor weather is forecasted. Tickets here)
Premiere of the digital restoration

Two women, a mother and her daughter, one migrated to Germany from Turkey, the other having grown up in Germany, speak about their lives. Both of them describe living between 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 dialog 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.” 

TÖCHTER ZWEIER WELTEN was presented as part of the International Forum of New Cinema in 1991 (nowadays: Berlinale Forum, Forums catalog page, German only). The digital restoration was made possible through the film heritage support program (FFE) financed by the Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the states of Germany, and the German Federal Film Board (FFA).

EKMEK PARASI – GELD FÜR'S BROT, Serap Berrakkarasu, Germany 1994, DCP, OV/EnS, 100 min
Sep 3, 2021 21:30 Open air cinema at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (at Arsenal Cinema if poor weather is forecasted. Tickets here)
Premiere of the digital restoration

“The vegetables come from the garden behind the house, the fish comes out of a can, and money for bread is earned at the factory. It’s because of this money that they came here. Women from Turkey stand side-by-side with women form Mecklenburg at the conveyor belt of a fish-processing factory in Lübeck. Their hands are stained brown, the pungent smell of fish clings to them, and their arms and backs ache. If these jobs were done by men, machines would have been invented long ago to replace them.” (Linde Fröhlich) The film observes the women at work. In the process, they talk about their lives, their sorrows, their grief, their hopes and dreams, describe the longing for home and the sense of being lost in a place foreign to them (press kit PDF, German only). 

The digital restoration of EKMEK PARASI – GELD FÜR'S BROT was made possible through the film heritage support program (FFE) financed by the Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the states of Germany, and the German Federal Film Board (FFA).

Link to the film database.