ALMANCI! – 50 YEARS OF FAKE MARRIAGE

Theatre/Performance/Film/Music/Literature
31 August – 31 October 2011

The festival opens on 31 August with Lukas Langhoff’s production of Pauschalreise – Die 1. Generation, the final piece in his outstandingly successful trilogy including Ferienlager – Die 3. Generation and Klassentreffen – Die 2. Generation. It is hard, or even impossible to feel at home in a country that still insists on regarding one’s presence as a problem after a half a century of shared history. But the long-abandoned places of one’s childhood offer just as little solace. In one of their thousand last fifteen minutes, first-generation pioneers turn their backs on both and embark on a new story and a new beginning: hand in hand with the third generation they discover the long lost kingdom of Mu. All three parts of the trilogy can be seen for the first and last time on the Almancı! festival’s Long Night of the Generations (3 and 4 September).

The Berlin premiere of the play Perikısı by Emine Sevgi Özdamar on 27 September is a further highlight of the festival. The story of a young girl from Istanbul who comes to Germany in search of freedom and the opportunity to discover herself and finds herself in a mysterious world of sombre realities and fairytale illusions, is presented by Michael Ronen as a surreal series of encounters with characters and events that marked the history of Turkish-German migration.

In 2008, Shermin Langhoff sent the new postmigrant Ballhaus off to a flying start with the theatre hike Kahvehane: Turkish Delight – German Fright?* Tunçay Kulaoğlu now presents six of the migrant and “un-limited” performances and installations in Turkish cafés in Kreuzberg in the new series Kahvehane Reloaded (21 to 25 September).

With Lö Bal Almanya, Almancı! presents the ultimate musical about 50 years of labour migration, followed by Verrücktes Blut, also directed by Nurkan Erpulat. Further highlights include Die Schwäne vom Schlachthof and Der Besuch, two stories by Hakan Savaş Mican that explore the walls in Berlin and people’s minds. Mican’s third production at the Ballhaus is Schnee, a stage version of the Nobel-Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk’s novel of the same name. The play transposes the novel into a modern German setting and uses the magic of the great Turkish storyteller to address the burning issues of our time.

The festival is accompanied by a series of films, music and literary events: Deniz Utlu and Oliver Kontny present literary memoirs and descriptions in Vibrationshintergrund**; Tunçay Kulaoğlu throws 50 films from 50 years against the screen in Gegen die Leinwände, and as part of the musical programme Imran Ayata and Bülent Kullukcu with Aşk, Mark ve Ölüm*** invite us all on a musical journey through decades of work and revolutions. Well-known and newly discovered writers and filmmakers are invited to share their thoughts on the past and the future on these evenings devoted to film, literature and music.

* Quote from Deniz Göktürk  **Quote from Selim Özdogan ***Quote from Band Ideal