Thomas Arslan's Berlin Trilogy

In May, Filmgalerie is releasing three of Thomas Arslan's movies on DVD: His most recent film Im Schatten (2010) as well as the first and last part of his Berlin trilogy that he made between 1996 and 2000. This provides us with the occasion to show the whole trilogy. Arslan observes, describes and narrates slowly. At the same time, he documents Berlin in the 1990s, a time when the city changed radically. Using beautifully unreal colors, the trilogy reveals parts of the city that might always have remained hidden had Berlin's whole architecture not been set in movement, found somewhere between old and new Berlin. The films are further connected by the fact that the main protagonists are always young people of Turkish origin who grew up in Germany. Each of the three films tells a self-contained story but the characters turn up in all of them time and again.