"Do you think Murat is guilty?" The Match Factory has debuted the promo trailer for the German political comedy Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush, which premiered at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival earlier this month. It won two awards: Best Screenplay and Best Lead Performance for actress / comedian Meltem Kaptan. Desperate to help her son, Rabiye Kurnaz, a housewife and loving mother from Bremen, goes to the police, notifies authorities and almost despairs at their impotence and in the end, against all the odds, something truly remarkable happens. She learns her son has been sent to Guantanamo, and spends years fighting to free him, taking her all the way to the Supreme Court in the US. Kaptan stars as Rabiye Kurnaz, joined by Alexander Scheer, Charly Hübner, Nazmi Kirik, Sevda Polat, Abdullah Emre Öztürk, and Safak Sengül. This is one of the only good films from the Berlin Film Festival...
- 2/22/2022
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
Turning a deeply serious, controversial incident in recent German history into a bouncy, beat-the-odds character comedy is a brave move. Thanks in large part to the extrovert likability of German-Turkish star Meltem Kaptan — well-known in Germany as a comedian and TV presenter — Andreas Dresen’s “Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush” just about gets away with it. But that’s as far as its bravery goes. Having expended all its creative energy on that one tonal dice-roll, the film proceeds by the numbers, with the messy, provocative real-life miscarriage of justice it chronicles tamed to march to the merry beat of the inspirational true-story genre.
The action begins one October morning in 2001, in the bustling Bremen household of the Turkish-immigrant Kurnaz family. Brassy matriarch Rabiye (Kaptan) — forever cheerfully cooking, cleaning and washing up for her brood — goes to call her eldest son Murat (Abdullah Emre Öztürk) down for breakfast and...
The action begins one October morning in 2001, in the bustling Bremen household of the Turkish-immigrant Kurnaz family. Brassy matriarch Rabiye (Kaptan) — forever cheerfully cooking, cleaning and washing up for her brood — goes to call her eldest son Murat (Abdullah Emre Öztürk) down for breakfast and...
- 2/19/2022
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
By Michael Atkinson
The idea of a "national" cinema, expressive of a particular and coherent cultural esprit, is a standard of most cinematic intercourse . until you confront the real map, in which Kosovar cinema is now primed to forge an identity of its own (as the Serbs and Slovenians have done), the ex-Soviet nations of the Silk Road are struggling to differentiate themselves from Russian film and the nationless movies of the Basque, the Romany and the Palestinians still hunt for footing and voice. Add to this gray zone the films of Kurdistan, a non-country standing nevertheless with its own army, government and debatable borders, and a nascent cinema rising with the ascent of the Iranian new wave and from the crater of the American occupation. Even within this context, Hiner Saleem is filmmaker on the roam . an Iraqi Kurd long expatriated to France, Saleem has made seven features, two in France,...
The idea of a "national" cinema, expressive of a particular and coherent cultural esprit, is a standard of most cinematic intercourse . until you confront the real map, in which Kosovar cinema is now primed to forge an identity of its own (as the Serbs and Slovenians have done), the ex-Soviet nations of the Silk Road are struggling to differentiate themselves from Russian film and the nationless movies of the Basque, the Romany and the Palestinians still hunt for footing and voice. Add to this gray zone the films of Kurdistan, a non-country standing nevertheless with its own army, government and debatable borders, and a nascent cinema rising with the ascent of the Iranian new wave and from the crater of the American occupation. Even within this context, Hiner Saleem is filmmaker on the roam . an Iraqi Kurd long expatriated to France, Saleem has made seven features, two in France,...
- 3/4/2008
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
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