The Flux of Transmigrant Identities in Thomas Arslan’s Brothers and Sisters

• Main Author: Bátori Anna
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sciendo 2017-12-01
• Series: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film and Media Studies
• Subjects: turkish-german cinema; thomas arslan; transmigrant identity; multicultural society; accented cinema
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1515/ausfm-2017-0003

The paper investigates Brothers and Sisters (Geschwister-Kardeşler, 1995), the first piece of Thomas Arslan’s Berlin-trilogy. While putting the film into the socio-historical context of the newly united German Republic, the study aims to highlight the characters’ struggle and constant shift between their Turkish and German identity. Through the narrative and textual analysis of Brothers and Sisters, the paper reveals the visual forms of social exclusion and concludes that in Arslan’s film, the characters bear with no social identity but various stages of identification, which keep them in an in-between, insecure position.