A film that reconciles
community, faith and
immigration.

SANTA MONICA, California - “When We Leave” is a family drama about an honor killing in the Turkish population of Berlin. The film, written and directed by Feo Aladag, a blond Austrian whose husband is a Turkish-born German filmmaker, is a tragedy about a Turkish family ‘s intergenerational conflicts that touch on a n emotional issue in European countries with significant Muslim populations: the powerlessness of women with male family members who consider violence a form of domestic discipline.

In the movie, Germany’s entry for an Academy Award in the foreign film category, Sibel Kekilli plays Umay, a German-born woman who flees her abusive husband in Turkey. Seeking shelter with family in Berlin, she finds that her freedom comes at a terrible cost.

Spurred on by a spate of honor killings - punitive murders within families for perceived sexual transgressions - in Germany, Ms. Aladag, 39, a former actress with a doctorate in psychology, researched the subject for three years before she began shooting. She pointed out that the practice of honor killing is nowhere prescribed in the Koran or any other bible. Its origins go “back much farther than the big monotheist religions,” she said, adding that they are tribal and patriarchal and designed to control female sexuality and reproduction.

Ms. Aladag’s cinematographer, editor, production designer and co-producer are all women. She said her mother, a Viennese painter, instilled in her an awareness of women’s issues. “I was raised on Alice Miller and Freud and Breuer,” she said.

The conflict between Umay’s love for her traditional family and her need to run her own modern life drives “When We Leave.” Yet the film is notable for its empathetic attention to the multiple points of view that separate Umay from her loving but conservative parents; a younger sister who takes what Ms. Aladag calls “the easy path”; her sweetly bewildered younger brother; and a furiously reactionary older brother whom Ms. Aladag describes as “a lost soul.”

Kirsten Niehuus of Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, the German-government film fund that partly financed the movie, said that “even though there is no doubt that honor killings cannot be tolerated at all, we understand that the murderers themselves are victims of a tradition that is bound to end, rather than monsters.”

Umay’s brief encounters with non-Turkish Germans in “When We Leave” are benign - in marked contrast to her growing vulnerability at home . When asked how this reconciles with persistent hostility among some Germans toward immigrants from Islamic countries, and with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent claim that multiculturalism had failed, Ms. Aladag spoke carefully .

“We have had a hard time recognizing that we are a society of migrants,” she said. “We have to live with the diversity that’s already there. I would consider this family German as well. If the majority doesn’t give the minority the feeling of being accepted and welcomed, how can you overcome old structures, if you draw your self-esteem and identity from a smaller community that isolates you, if you define your honor as a man by the sexual innocence of your wives and daughters?”

“When We Leave” ends with private catastrophe - and, perhaps, a glimmer of romantic hope for an ethnically blended future.

“Love is strong,” Ms. Aladag said . “Maybe we should talk to Mrs. Merkel about this.”


By ELLA TAYLOR