Ellbogen
Elbow
Aslı Özarslan
Hazal is 17 and lives in Berlin. Her greatest wish is to have a life, a real future! Despite writing countless applications, she can’t find an apprenticeship and isn’t even invited for an interview. Instead, she’s stuck in a pointless job centre training scheme. On her 18th birthday, Hazal wants to celebrate with her friends – just like the old days, when they thought they could achieve whatever they wanted as long as they stuck together. But in the queue outside the club, Hazal (played by Melia Kara in her first role) realises she doesn’t really belong here. The bouncer turns them away. On her way home, her simmering frustration and anger erupt into violence and a fatal incident, prompting Hazal to run away to Istanbul. A stranger to the city, she is left to navigate the challenges on her own.
The film adaptation of Fatma Aydemir’s bestseller of the same name is an uncompromising, atmospherically dense portrait of a young woman and her search for her place in the world. It makes us want to run through the night with her, to find out what will happen to her and to us all. Hazal is »neither a one-dimensional ›victim‹ nor a model migrant who does everything right. She is a complex female figure who refuses to conform to the perpetrator-victim dichotomy… Hazal’s world is one that is familiar not only to me but to many migrants in Germany and Europe. It is a life where you constantly have to assert or prove yourself. In Hazal, this society is exposed« (Aslı Özarslan).
Guest: Aslı Özarslan
Aslı Özarslan
Born in Berlin, Aslı Özarslan studied theatre and media at the University of Bayreuth, philosophy and sociology at the Université Sorbonne IV in Paris and documentary film directing at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. She has worked as an editor for 3sat Kulturzeit, ZDF, and ARD’s foreign studio in Warsaw and attended film workshops in Israel and Turkey. She received the Deutschlandstipendium in 2014, a scholarship for film and media art from the Akademie der Künste in 2015 and a scholarship from Tarabya Cultural Academy in Istanbul in 2017. Insel 36 (2014) and her graduation film Dil Leyla (2016) earned her international and national awards. Her debut feature film Elbow celebrated its world premiere at the 74th Berlinale in the Generation programme.
Films by Aslı Özarslan
Dil Leyla 2016 | Insel 36 2014 | Canim Kreuzberg 2013