Intercultural Encounters in Fatih Akın’s Films
Intercultural Encounters in Fatih Akın’s Films

Summary/Abstract: Fatih Akın, a German-born film director of Turkish descent, has made a number of films that concentrate on migrants’ experiences of cultural conflict and living between two worlds. This article focuses on the intercultural encounters in Akın’s films with the theoretical frame of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism. Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism places a strong emphasis on the self and the other in the construction of knowledge in the realm of human sciences, which means that dialogue is the core of Bakhtinian thought. For Bakhtin the other is crucial in accomplishing individual consciousness, and it is impossible to construct a self out of a single consciousness. In the light of Bakhtin’s concepts, this study attempts to analyse the intercultural encounters in Fatih Akın’s films Short Sharp Shock (Kurz und schmerzlos – Kısa ve Acısız, 1998), Head-On (Gegen die Wand – Duvara Karşı, 2004), The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite – Yaşamın Kıyısında, 2007).

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