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

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