Amrum (2025), Fatih Akin.
Sirat (2025), Oliver Laxe.
What are you doing? You must be mad. That leaves one question. What made you mad?
I look in a mirror which only reflects the past or the future, but never the present. The present is unnamable, and thus films exist to give things names. But which names? Must you be from outside to make these films? To be of Galician ancestry in France, to be of Turkish ancestry in Germany? Does it give you insight, does it give you license? We shall see.
You are destined for disappointment. You are looking for your daughter, or maybe for your mother. Nobody here – so busy celebrating something you do not understand – has seen her. Yet she is everywhere they are not. She is in the landscape which will shape you, which will determine which path you take. This is a metaphor, is it not? Or is it simply life and death?
You are her father, you are her son. You are nothing to her any more, a disappointment, a memory, a foreigner in her land. She cannot return from where she has gone, and you cannot join her there. Yours is the story of recognising this even if you cannot accept it, and learning that it will shape the rest of your life even if that life is not to be so long.
Life and death are here, in the hills, in the waters, in the hands of the people around you. Some of those people wear uniforms and sour mouths, but they are just jigsaw pieces of war. War itself is over the horizon and far away. Perhaps it is starting, perhaps it is ending. That’s the nature of war, to always be starting or ending. By the time you see it, it is too late.
The death you find, in the hills, in the waters, have nothing to do with the war. People are the ultimate predator, even to other people, but you should never bet against the house. Nature will always win, will always winnow you down to the last man and woman. You can climb, but you can also fall. You can swim, but you can also drown.
In your former life everything was fixed, including your identity, but here you must find a new identity. Your new identity is not something you can build alone. It is something that other people build for you, with their questions and answers, their hopes and fears. And so you are always asking – who am I now? And now? And now?
Civilisation is far away from us. We were supposed to carry it in our hearts, but somehow we lost it somewhere. We were told that we were civilised, but now we see that was a lie. We are like tourists who have visited civilisation and found it wanting. We find what we want out here: in the desert, on the island, always surrounded by sand.
We are surrounded by water, if only because we are made of water. There is no water to drink here – all salt or sunken – and there is no food, at least not the food which we need so desperately. We start to realise that this perpetual seeking is what constitutes life. We can either suffer alone or suffer together. Suffering together makes suffering bearable.
Planes dropping ballast into the sea from sky, mines pushing up through the earth to the sky. Always the sky. Always the prayers, although not the prayers you expected. It is hard to pray when you might lose your footing, when you might fall from the cliff or drown in the sea. It is a hard road for those who believe, and those who do not.
In what language are the prayers spoken? A language which has been transplanted from one place to another, a language which is pinned in one place like a butterfly. The people who call these places home call you a stranger. You are from outside, yet one day soon you will all be the same. The war will begin or the war will end and you will all still be together.
Both films end with transport. We are returning to the places we came from, even if we are not the same people who left. We sit in a cart being pulled by a horse, or we sit on top of a train, and it is unclear where we are going, exactly, and unclear whether we can ever return. A child has died. A child has been born. The world will turn.
Don’t look so worried. You are not mad. The world is mad. The difference is important.