Movie maker of the moment

On the eve of Fatih Akin’s acclaimed new film opening in Britain, Marie-Pierre Moine hears how he has been inspired by the cultures of both Germany and Turkey When Fatih Akin was born in Hamburg in the summer of 1973, German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Fear Eats the Soul had just hit the screens. It moved and shocked audiences everywhere with a stark but touching portrayal of a love affair between a middle-aged German woman and a younger Moroccan immigrant, a representative of the many people whom the Germans quaintly called “guest workers”. This was ground-breaking stuff. Akin’s own parents were in the first Gastarbeiter wave to arrive in Germany from Turkey in the 1960s. Now, three decades later, when he is compared to Fassbinder, Akin pays tribute to the late director but says his work wasn’t influenced by him. Times have changed. “We no longer tells our stories from the margins , but from the centre of society,” he says, expressing himself attractively in fluent English, his third language. At the Q and A session after a London screening of his latest film, he listens to questions with interest and thinks about them. There is nothing pat about his answers. You get the feeling that this is a man whose mind is constantly working. continue