- 14 years ago
A nostalgic and heart-warming comic celebration of German-Turkish identity, spanning three generations. A story about a migrant community in an increasingly globalised world.
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00:00He met her in the fall. He took her to a movie. And when they done it all. He took
00:13her to a movie.
00:14Hello and welcome to the Fabulous Picture Show. I'm Amanda Palmer. This week we're joined by the
00:17Shandarelli sisters whose film Armanya offers a lighter look at the German-Turkish identity
00:23crisis. For the million-plus foreign workers arriving in 1960s Germany, something was lost
00:34in translation. The sisters' film is a tribute to the pluck and initiative of their ancestors.
00:44He didn't really kidnap your grandmother, did he? He did. Oh, yes. Also on the show, a descendant
00:52of the Shaman Kings sounds a note of environmental caution. If you cut a sacred tree, the tree
00:58will fall on you. But first, Life in a Day is the inspiring result of an Oscar-winning documentary
01:06team who asked thousands of people to send in films about what they did on one day. What
01:21are the questions posed by Oscar-winning director Kevin MacDonald to inspire people from all
01:26over the world. To take part in a feature film crafted solely from homemade clips uploaded
01:34to YouTube. It's a film which is trying to explore in a serious way what it's like to be alive
01:44today,
01:45or what it was like to be alive on the 24th of July, with all the kind of pain and
01:49violence and horror,
01:50but also love and happiness and hope and expectation that is present in that day, that is present in every
01:58day.
01:59I love life. I really love my family.
02:06There are antecedents to our film, no doubt, that people have made archive films before, but what's
02:10obviously new is, we surrendered to uploaders, we surrendered to YouTube users and sort of people
02:17sending in-camera work, with no preconcepts of what they were going to show us. And of course,
02:22this is the first time it's all been done all on one day.
02:27Over 81,000 people submitted more than four and a half thousand hours of footage, all shot,
02:32on July 24th, 2010.
02:35There was nothing really set up. There was no narrative ahead of time.
02:42It was completely open for people to express whatever they wanted to express. And as a result,
02:47I think we got some amazing shots that you probably wouldn't get out of a professional film crew.
02:53Good morning, everyone.
02:55I was shooting a Korean guy who travels all around the world by bicycle. He's doing this already for 10
03:02years.
03:02He's been to 192 countries, and he really shows you the power everyone has. The only thing you have to
03:13change is the view, and then you have the same power as he does.
03:21It's not easy to explain motivation, but impossible is possible.
03:31There's these ways of sort of building a sequence as if one thing is happening, but through many different clips.
03:39A guy in India takes a newspaper out of his newspaper basket. He drops it through a letterbox in Italy,
03:47and a guy in Spain picks it up, and a person in Peru opens it and reads it.
03:50You could follow it as if it was one story, but it's actually made up of Frankenstein parts.
03:57I'm very thankful to the beautiful star, and I'll be out there again, doing crazy things, and enjoying life.
04:09To hear ordinary people express those very basic emotions and ideas is really powerful and very direct,
04:17and I think that's what's so beautiful about the film overall is that it has this honesty about it, this
04:24directness about it.
04:29We did this for a project, and then it became so much more for us, and it's been wonderful.
04:38To me it was like a poem, like a cinematic poem, you know, or a song or something.
04:47It's a movie you have to see more than once, I think, to really be able to take it all
04:52in.
04:53There's just so many, it's a movie about nuances in people, like little things that you don't see in scripted
05:01movies.
05:02These are things you can't capture unless you're just lucky.
05:10I'm very fond of every single clip in the film, and they're all, you know, everything, when it's whittled down
05:15that much,
05:15you know that the selection process, it's there because it has to be there, and the whole thing falls apart.
05:21The baton is dropped if there's one bad clip, so every clip is serving a purpose,
05:26and I love them all like my children, so I wouldn't want to pick.
05:35A visual treat now with Busong about the myths, magic, and shamanistic beliefs of the Palawan,
05:41the indigenous people of the Philippines' stunning Palawan region.
06:00Busong is the first indigenous feature film from Palawan, the pristine island province of the southern Philippines.
06:08Inspired by Palawan myth and legend learned as a child from his mother, and rich with cultural symbolism and poetic
06:16beauty,
06:18writer-director Oreos Silito's Busong is a cautionary tale about the perils of environmental exploitation.
06:25What's the meaning of the title of the film Busong?
06:28Busong is instant karma.
06:31Instantly you get your karma, or your faith.
06:33It's this magical thing that's very Palawan.
06:36If you cut a sacred tree, the tree will fall on you.
06:39Is it always to do with nature?
06:40Yeah, nature and other men.
06:43If you're talking about Busong, who's like the ultimate?
06:47Because we're talking about animists, aren't we?
06:49Yeah, yeah.
06:49The Palawan is one of the rare monotheistic tribes.
06:52We have one god called Ampu.
06:54He's like the weaver of the universe.
06:56And then he has series of diwatas.
07:01Diwata is like spirit.
07:02Spirit of the forest, spirit of the trees, spirit of the mountains.
07:05What fascinated me about the film is making these kind of concepts almost accessible to a western audience
07:12who maybe had never thought about these things.
07:14Like the nature itself is almost a character, you know.
07:17Right, exactly.
07:19The main character of Busong is Palawan, the land itself.
07:24Man and nature is one.
07:26Alessandra De Rossi plays Punai, an embodiment of nature.
07:34I was born with wounds in my feet.
07:37As the people try to damage the environment, so do my wounds worsen.
07:45Clifford Banigali plays a half-Palawan emigre returning to the island in search of his roots.
07:52Who rediscovers his inner potential as a shamanic healer.
07:59While the animistic Palawan culture blurs boundaries between nature and man,
08:04with its acute detailing of ritual, artifact and mythology,
08:08Busong transcends the border between fiction and anthropological document.
08:41And when it comes to the
08:47You've been raised on storytelling and I suppose many generations of
08:51storytelling culture do you think that in some way by making films you're kind
08:55of continuing this tradition my mother told me that our chanters chanted
09:01is tultol. Tultols are like epics, epic chants. They would chant it for a week and my
09:14mother told me those were our movies son. We would imagine each chant each night and
09:20we would anticipate the next chapter the next night and the next night and I
09:25guess cinema is my tultol. As an ascendant of the Palawan Shaman Kings I think it's
09:35my time to tell our stories to cinema. Before it was spread of mouth now it's
09:42still cinema.
09:53Welcome to this fabulous picture show screening of Almanya which means Germany
09:58in Turkish. Can we please welcome the filmmakers here? This is Yasmin and Nisrin
10:02Shandarelli.
10:08Why did you want to make this film so much? Well I think it's a bit like saying
10:14thank you to our grandparents the movie so of course it was it came from the
10:18bottom of our hearts. It just sounds cheesy it is as though most of the the
10:24movies made in Germany about immigrants or Turkish immigrants were always ending in
10:28drama and we had the feeling that we we should make a comedy about it.
10:37The Shandarelli sisters comedy spans 45 years it takes us back to the 60s soon
10:43after West Germany opened its doors to foreign laborers.
10:49The film tells the story of guest worker number one million and one
10:53Hussein Yilmaz and the lives of his extended family including third
11:00generation Jack who's in the throes of an identity crisis.
11:09The film launches into an odyssey as the three generations travel to Anatolia to
11:16rediscover their heritage.
11:25It took 14 years for the Turkish German sisters to finish the screenplay.
11:33What our grandparents and our parents told us was a lot of quite funny things and we
11:38thought that's interesting nobody remembers that nobody remembers that the
11:42beginnings weren't so hard yet there were no no negativity also between the Germans
11:47and the Turkish and other nationalities.
11:56I just wanted to make a really subjective movie and tell things that commonly
12:02weren't really known in Germany.
12:07The film's release coincides with real life concerns about European immigration.
12:15This multicultural approach saying that we simply live side by side and are happy about
12:20each other this approach has failed utterly failed.
12:25And it's just this mindset that the Shandarellis are trying to subvert.
12:35We definitely think that laughing with each other is a good base for everything.
12:42It's good to take things not too serious and just to see humans as a human and family
12:48as a family.
12:48Because families I think are almost all over the world the same.
12:52They are always trouble, they are always weird characters and you have to deal with them.
12:58And they are good fun.
13:00So don't worry about them.
13:00So don't worry about them.
13:08Besides giving me a belly full of giggles, what were you hoping the audiences would walk
13:14away with?
13:15Just to make them feel really foreign somewhere and to have this experience of being really
13:21in a place where you don't speak the language.
13:27I think it's quite important to have that experience.
13:35When we wrote the script and of course it's mainly done for German audience then when we
13:40decided the Turkish would speak all fluently German and the Germans would speak of course
13:45a foreign language nobody understands gibberish.
13:48And a lot of audience would come and say that was really nice to just have their perspective,
13:54just to feel how they would feel.
13:57Greetings to me.
13:57I'm drinking it.
14:00Did you all know it was gibberish?
14:03You noticed?
14:05But it's really funny.
14:06A lot of even German audience they are really like confused.
14:10Like at the beginning they go, do they really speak such a weird accent where you are from?
14:28I'm Turkish and I was born in London but my family left Cyprus in 1968 so a lot of the
14:33stories in the film I was laughing out loud because they resonate with me.
14:38What was the mirror to your life?
14:40Sleeping, the brothers sharing a bed.
14:52And also for me not knowing am I Turkish, am I English.
14:57You know my Turkish is awful.
14:58I remember going to Turkey and trying to speak Turkish and being told that I spoke donkey Turkish.
15:15What is your identity?
15:17Do tell us.
15:17Tell us what you are.
15:19It's really difficult to just say okay I'm one or I'm this or that.
15:23I mean I just accepted it and I say yeah it's me it's Nesrin and I am born in Germany
15:28and
15:28I am German but I have Turkish origin so.
15:31Sometimes you feel a bit more Turkish and sometimes you feel a bit more German or sometimes
15:35you feel English.
15:36So it helps just to relax about it and say it's all good.
15:44You know being mixed is fine.
15:45What is the beautiful country where your father comes from?
15:49Anatolian.
15:50Oh, it's just a Europa card.
15:55We can put it here.
15:59In recent years many people have been scared to make jokes about their religion or cultural
16:07differences.
16:08In many ways I was very interested to see you try and reclaim comedy almost as a genre but
16:15it has been a bit of a no-go area.
16:17Would you agree or not?
16:18Definitely but we were in the luckier position because you know we are showing our perspectives
16:25which was of course seeing the German culture like from outside.
16:50The question would be how would you know if we would have done the same with Islam for example then
16:57you know yeah it would have been maybe a big issue.
17:00Is there anybody here that's uncomfortable to ask?
17:03I mean were there some things that anyone thought might have been a little offensive?
17:06The scene with the boy having the nightmare about the Jesus trying to eat him.
17:12If I was reading that script I'd be like whoa would I want to be involved in that?
17:16That's true.
17:16But it didn't come across that way at all.
17:18It didn't offend and I hope no one was offended by it.
17:25But you are very cheeky and subversive at times when you show that to become a German you have to
17:31eat pork and go on holidays to Mallorca.
17:35I mean and the transformation of obviously his wife.
17:45Why do you two get away with it do you think?
17:47Because it's true I think yeah.
17:50It's a it's a nightmare so I guess people of course see the point it's not men deadly serious.
17:56So it is a way of you know pointing out little tiny things where you can laugh about but of
18:01course if you put it into a dream then people understand.
18:14I really loved the way that you told the story often through childlike eyes when we look back nostalgically when
18:22you hear about your grandparents story you treated it obviously I felt like I was going into a dream world
18:27of fantasy where kidnapping your grandmother is a perfectly fine thing.
18:33Tell us about that because he didn't really kidnap your grandmother did he?
18:36He did.
18:37Oh.
18:38Yes.
18:38That's not very funny.
18:40But that was like the most normal thing in these days and still is you know in some parts.
18:44But she was agreeable to being kidnapped in some way?
18:47Well the funny thing is.
18:49Not really I think.
18:50She told us.
18:51She was like.
18:51She was not sure.
18:53She wasn't sure if she wanted him really to marry him but she had no choice.
18:57And in those days really it was a matter if they were alone for a few hours so what had
19:03happened that it was basically then that girl could not marry anybody else because everyone would be thinking oh she
19:10might be not a virgin anymore.
19:15How autobiographical is this?
19:17How much do we get a diary into your lives?
19:19Little things like the Christmas scene.
19:31And your mother really brought out the presents unwrapped.
19:35Yeah she had no clue so.
19:36And she was really quite upset that she couldn't fulfill your Christmassy notion.
19:40She got like oh come on you know it doesn't matter just do it somehow and we're like no you
19:46have to do it the right way.
19:48The tree has to look like this and this.
19:50She was like oh goodness.
19:52You two were nightmares weren't you?
19:55What can I do?
19:56I'm going to have my pen in every morning.
19:59What have you done?
20:00What am I?
20:01What are you doing for a weird sperm?
20:04Can I pick on your boyfriend for a minute?
20:06Yes sure.
20:07So you have definitely been part of this journey I'd imagine.
20:11Yeah.
20:11Unless you're a new boyfriend.
20:12No no.
20:13I've been part of it for the last four and a half years so it's been a big part of
20:18my life.
20:18So when did the English boyfriend character come into the film?
20:21About four and a half years ago.
20:23Yeah when he came into the film.
20:24You wrote your way into the script.
20:26Yeah.
20:27Do you have a father?
20:41I was like oh no I've never been pregnant.
20:47No thank God for me.
20:49I wouldn't be alive now if she had I don't think.
20:53Thank you for making us laugh ladies this afternoon.
20:56Everybody can we please thank you here.
20:58This is Yasmin and Nisreen.
21:00Thank you very much.
21:01Thank you for coming.
21:17Was there something fishy about the death of Princess Diana and her lover Dodie fired in the Paris tunnel?
21:26British actor and bon vivant Keith Allen thinks there was.
21:30When the woman left a note saying FYI if I'm dead here's how it's gonna happen and then it happens
21:36exactly like that I think someone should pay attention.
21:38His documentary unlawful killing presents a smattering of familiar theories.
21:44Diana was certain that her phones were being tapped by the British secret services.
21:48Every time she'd hear a click he used to say boys time to change the tape.
21:53It suggests the establishment wanted Diana out of the way and that the media turned a blind eye especially during
22:00the 2007 inquest into the deaths.
22:02There were arguments lies tears and accusations yet before the court case had even begun the media had already decided
22:10what the verdict should be.
22:12I had always suspected that we had never really got to the bottom of how they died anyway and I
22:17wanted to I wanted to watch this case unravel.
22:21The film revisits some perennially unanswered questions.
22:26What you are seeing is what the CCTV camera at the entrance to the armour tunnel was recording at the
22:31time of the crash.
22:33Nothing.
22:34Because it was switched off.
22:36And the supposed motives for killing her.
22:39Bar it.
22:41One down.
22:42One down.
22:43One million.
22:44I believe that Diana was killed by the arms industry.
22:51Richard Wiseman and Keith Allen. Thank you very much indeed.
22:54At this year's Cannes Film Festival Allen faced a room full of sceptics.
22:58He does nothing Keith. Nothing new at all.
23:00And wasn't helped by the revelation that the film had been bankrolled by Dodie's father, the wealthy and controversial businessman
23:07Mohamed Fayed.
23:09I'm wondering why you did not indicate your relationship with Mr. Fayed in the film.
23:13I think you'll find that there are an immense number of films coming out of America and all over the
23:16world that are financed by the mafia and there's no reference to those.
23:19So, you know.
23:21So, it's a Mohamed Fayed person.
23:23It's just a curse.
23:24But was the hostile reaction to Allen's film all part of an entrenched media position?
23:30I was expecting worse, to be honest.
23:32That is a public arena in its life.
23:35Once they get back into their hotel rooms, you know.
23:38I can't wait to see what they write tomorrow.
23:41To be ten times worse than that.
23:42If you were ever going to do something dodgy to Diana, that's the time you would do it.
23:46She'd become troubled, as she used to say to me.
23:49I'm troubled to them.
23:50I won't go away.
23:51I won't go quietly.
23:57That's it for this fabulous picture show.
23:59And the girls are going to say goodbye in Donkey Turkish.
24:04Hoşçakalın.
24:05That was quite good.
24:06That wasn't Donkey Turkish.
24:07Donkey Turkish.
24:09Too long.
24:10Bye.
24:10Choose in German.
24:26On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate this film?
24:29Eight.
24:30Six, seven.
24:31Strong eight, definitely.
24:33I loved it.
24:34I thought it was a very sort of warm-hearted film.
24:37I think it's quite interesting now, especially because there's this discussion in Germany about foreigners.
24:45Really funny, really distinctive characters.
24:49And just a great laugh, yeah.
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