Fratricide

Brudermord (Fratricide) 2005 Luxembourg/Germany/France (94 minutes) written, directed and produced by Yılmaz Arslan; cinematographer, Jean-François Hensgens; editor, André Bendocchi-Alves; music, Evgueni Galperine; sound, Laurent Benaïm.

This fast-paced drama shows ages-old ethnic enmities and cultural practices gussied up with urban hip-hop culture that bleed into the developed world along with globalization’s cheap labor, goods and services.

Director and writer Yılmaz Arslan starts with strong impressions that tie in the characters’ backgrounds with the end of his story. This catches a viewer’s attention right away. It also gives insights into his characters such that once the story gets rolling he doesn’t have to brake his narrative pace with distracting exposition.

The violent scenes are effective because they are edited in series of shots that let a viewer know what is happening and suggest how it feels, but leave the most lurid images to the viewer’s imagination.  

The result makes for a well-designed mosaic: all the pieces come into clear focus by the end of Arslan’s telling. The young Kurdish-German director dedicated his film to Italian great Pier Paolo Pasolini.

The plot goes something like this.

Ibrahim ‘Ibo’ Denizli (Xewat Geçtan), a young ethnic Kurd, witnesses his parents’ deaths in a massacre in rural Turkey at the hands of government troops.

The Kurds are an Indo-Iranian people whose traditional tribal areas are in adjacent parts of southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq and northwestern Iran. Historically, they were a force for Turks, Persians and Arabs to reckon with. The region’s twentieth century governments reduced them to resentful minorities in modern Turkey, Iraq and Iran.

Ibo arrives in a home for refugee minors in an unidentified, German-speaking, European city, sustained by folktales he learned from his parents and grandfather.

At the refugee home Ibo meets Azad Karaman (Erdal Celik), a Kurdish teenager of similar background. Azad’s immigrant older brother Şemsettin ‘Şemo’ Karaman (Nurettin Celik) had sent for Azad to join him in the Promised Land.

We first see Azad herding sheep alone on a vast Anatolian prairie. The prosperous Şemo, who supports his parents in rural southeastern Turkey (and may also be on the run from Turkish authorities for political activities in Turkish Kurdistan), turns out to be a pimp running Russian prostitutes.

Shamed by his older brother’s ‘business,’ Azad stays in the refugee home. He shaves Turkish immigrants in the men’s room of a tavern in an immigrant quarter—a technically illegal but honorable activity to provide extra income. The younger Ibo becomes his assistant.

The film opens with people mourning a young man and preparing his body for burial. This turns out to be Ahmet (Oral Uyan), a second-generation Turkish resident of the same European city, in which his immigrant parents own and operate a grocery store. 

Ahmet and his brother Zeki (Bülent Büyükasık), in their early 20s, work in the family grocery by day. Away from their conservative parents’ home and business, they strike the attitudes of the guns ‘n’ pit bulls urban hip-hop lifestyle.

The street clichés of Power and Violence are little more than style accessories in the hands of bullies against the business edge of a knife or straight razor. Though in the end, a hip-hop style ‘sideways shooter’ manages a wildly fired hit home.

Ibo and Azad cross paths with the older Ahmet and Zeki in a ‘respect’ incident on an urban railway car. This leads later to a knifing that escalates to a blood feud, the ‘fratricide’ of the title.

And a body on the pavement brings in European law enforcement with its due process, interpreters, social workers and ethnic Turkish officers. True to form, a German-speaking police official raises his voice as he loses his patience, but the police do not abuse or beat any prisoner. European instrumental authority is more like a pale shadow.

In fact, most of the action takes place in an as though immigrant inner space or parallel universe within and yet far removed from the everyday life of this generic European city.

Apart from the grocery, young non-Europeans in this story do not display the least desire or illusion about integration into European life or society. Life comes down to acquiring money, Şemo tells his brother: ‘Europeans’ figured this out and immigrants must learn how to master it.

Being in ‘democratic’ Europe also gives minorities a voice unthinkable in their home countries. When a Kurd dies in police custody, Zilan (Taies Farzan), an émigrée Kurdish activist, bull-horns in to exploit the tragedy for her own political ends. Zilan tries to inflame the local population against officialdom’s purported ‘racism.’

Erdal Celik resembles a young Al Pacino, but his Azad is a character more like James Dean’s Jim Stark in Rebel without a Cause (1955).

Like Jim, Azad knows little about the world. What he sees, what adults tell him and how they act don’t add up. He just wants to do the right thing. Azad’s situation is the more difficult because he speaks a language understood by few outside the Kurdish community; his accented Turkish marks him as a Kurd, and he speaks and understands practically no German. Azad can rely on no one but himself.

In his almost inevitably ill-fated end, Azad, like Jim Stark, tries to right the world and make his own little family with Ibo and Mirka (Xhiljona Ndoja), an Albanian girl his age from the refugee home.

Most of the action takes place in the spring, from shortly before Kurdish Nevruz, or New Year, celebrated at the spring equinox, to after Easter. Mirka first approached Azad after a Christian Easter service in the refugee center.

No animals were mistreated in the making of this film, though the squeamish should be warned that the most graphic scene occurs after a character is gutted in a knife fight. As the victim groans to contain his exposed entrails, his leashed pit bull gets the idea that he is offering her a treat.