Representation of European Utopia and its Discontents in the Films of Fatih Akın

Introduction: Fatih Akın’s Cinematographic Transitivity of Identities

In this article, I explore how Fatih Akın, one of the most well-known filmmakers of Germany belonging to the second-generation Turkish immigrants, draws on music and sounds to depict socially, spatially, and culturally built identities. Akın delicately delineates how the ideas of “Europe”—liberties, human rights, scientific progress, and so on—have become incarcerated in an understanding of “European identity.” As it becomes apparent in some of his movies, such European ideals on the contrary have become manifested in a Eurocentric perspective which creates an “Other.” This is done to strengthen a version of European identity against immigrant non-Christian cultures, irrespective of Europe’s multicultural political discourses.

I would argue that the cinematic experience of Akın displays the third space of the diasporic communities of Europe (see also Soja, 1996, on thirdspace). While tackling the socioeconomic differences within and among the local and urban (immigrant) communities, the director also lays bare intergenerational conflicts. He engages with such matters in tandem with the clashes within immigrant communities around the imposition of traditional values, as well as the conflicts they go through as a consequence of their (constructed) memories of homeland. This can make their connection with the society they are living in, or the previous generation of their own ethnic communities, problematic.

The emotional landscapes of Akın’s protagonists are bound by the contexts of the their cultural, economic, and historical situatedness. In other words, Akın dexterously exhibits the identity politics prevalent in Europe and beyond by means of the emotional geographies formed by his protagonists, intensified by music and the sound mix he utilizes. The spectator is unraveled through the creative play of space, by which Akın unearths the possibility or desire for a space that leads to security or insecurity. This is what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (2009) has also considered the third area, which is both engendered and forms the cultural experience.

For Winnicott (2009), through play the infant expresses the formation of a cultural experience in this third area space. It involves imagination and creativity, and is the cultural experience where the me-extensions, and not-me take shape. It is this space which also brings about the feelings of security or insecurity, that is linked to the initial stages of development of connectedness toward others and the community (Winnicott, 2009, p. 135).

Deriving from this standpoint of Winnicott, Featherstone (2017) holds that neoliberal capitalist globalization pumps a false sense of security, one that is mainly economic and social. On the other hand, this feeling of security which Winnicott has once emphasized comes from a liminal space. It is altered through creative play during childhood, which involves imagination and is a milestone for cultural experience. In other words, late global capitalism creates insecurities through precariousness, fear, anxiety, and death. Hence, the world brought about by neoliberal capitalism is full of dystopia, or rather a “utopia-cum-dystopia,” as Featherstone (2017, p. 3) puts it, where individuals are reduced to objects and are measured by their economic value.

With regard to the above concerns, what are the possible ways to draw on utopian imagination? One of them, I suggest, would be looking through popular culture texts, such as cinema, in order to analyze how the local and global contexts are worked up in relation to politics, economy, and culture. As global migrations shape geographies and manifest new forms of power relations, they also become manifest through interpersonal and group relationships within everyday life practices. People bring forth and exert their cultural and ethnic backgrounds where they settle, which opens up social milieus anew; disrupting and unsettling the existing status-quo. The characters of Akın’s cinematography reflect the identity politics of Europe and their dynamics.

I would also argue that the third area, the potential space, influences the shaping of utopias. In other words, it forms the way in which we would want our world to transform. Utopias in this sense should not be thought as solely imaginary places in a future time detached from the present state of affairs, but rather as reflections on current conditions. For instance, Marx and Engels drew on the cultural perceptions of Victorian Manchester, thus they analyzed the industrialized society of England while contemplating on their future utopia (Gordin et.al., 2010, p. 4). As Gordin et al. (2010) highlight, “utopias and dystopias are histories of the present” (p. 1). At the same time, “everyday utopianism” is as significant as the grandiose utopian projects, as this kind of utopianism according to Pinder (2010, p. 205) engages with urban life and its streets in a critical manner.

In his films, Akın projects such a utopian idea by looking at the everyday life and politics of his European context, particularly Germany, from the level of the streets. In a way, it could be argued that the director feeds on the dystopic occurrences of everyday life, such as xenophobia, discrimination, prejudice, and so forth. However, at the same time, he also builds into the idea of utopia through friendships, solidarity, and love, through his protagonists who may be from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. ¹

To go back to Winnicott’s concept of third area, I would argue that this is the space where utopia and/or utopia-cum-dystopia takes shape. This is the area where the psychological security of a child is formed, allowing the experience of reality through creativity, play, and imagination. Correspondingly I would argue that Fatih Akın’s third area takes place by means of his utilization of cityscapes and eclectic forms of music while trying to tackle the issues aforementioned. His films allow the audience to experience reality through his artistic creativity—that is, by means of his representations of diasporic communities while engaging with space (mainly urban landscape) and sound (music). This allows the viewer to encounter the realities of various (diasporic) communities through the everyday lives of the protagonists, while taking stock of (European) identity politics—consequently reimagining and reconfiguring a multicultural society-in-dialogue. Akın’s employment of eclectic music and sounds is also in alignment, I believe, with his postindustrial multiethnic European identity. In other words, creative and artistic expressions, such as the films of Akın, can pave the way for rethinking utopia(s) through identity politics.

Identity Politics of Europe in the Eyes of the Beholder: Fatih Akın and His Audiovisual Mobilities

A second-generation Turkish German director born in Hamburg, and one of Germany’s distinct filmmakers in our contemporary era, Fatih Akın has emphasized his dislike of hyphenated identity labels. This can be observed from his words in an interview he gave after his film Short Sharp Shock (Akın, 1998) gained wide success in 1998: “If I can’t be Fatih Akın, I’d prefer to be known as the German Martin Scorsese” (Elsaesser, 2008). Akın, through his films, creates spaces by reflecting on geographies and places, which can also be thought of as flows of desire that form a third space. He utilizes the cityscapes such as Hamburg and Istanbul for his films’ protagonists, where they are settled but “unsettled,” just like Akın himself. Such unsettledness can sometimes be seen by their transition between these two cities, or the idea of going back, as well as a disturbance or a feeling of displacement they seem to experience. As Gueneli (2011) denotes, Fatih Akın’s urban landscapes are mainly demarcated by an ethnically diverse range of characters, as well as the

musical mixtures juxtaposed with historic and national landmarks. Ultimately, these cityscapes offer the audience a visual and aural experience of classic European cities, which become the backdrop for the love stories within the film’s narratives. (p. 72)

Fatih Akın’s films can thus be considered as being representative of European urban cinema. Akın skillfully questions the identity of “Europeanness” in his movies through the cosmopolitan urban landscape and multicultural identities he employs. Such scrutinization of identities, be it on the individual, national, and/or postnational level, are emphasized by the sampling of various eclectic music genres. Just as the identity of Europe has been shifting, to the point where it may be hard for someone to talk about a single European identity, Akın’s filmic representations have been successful in capturing the postindustrial cityscapes of certain European cities that are ethnically mixed, where one can frequently come across graffiti on walls and franchising logos (see Mazierska & Rascaroli, 2003, p. 11). Moreover, as Gueneli (2019) states, the multiethnic tensions of Akın’s films are displayed aurally as well as visually. Thus, places are portrayed in dynamic relationships, as it will be explained later on, in contrast to them existing in isolation whilst being alongside each other (p. 7).

Fatih Akın’s (2005) documentary film, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul, is one of the striking examples of how he pieces together the urban landscape with the music and sounds of cities. As Göktürk (2010) highlights, music has been a trigger for Akın’s “mobile imagination” (p. 185). The film engages with the music of the city of Istanbul through the narration of Alexander Hacke, who is the bass guitarist of the 1980s industrial experimental group Einstürzenden Neubauten. In his attempt to configure Istanbul’s sounds in a conceptual manner for this film, Akın collaborated with Doublemoon, the record label of the music company Pozitif based in Istanbul. In this respect, “the film goes beyond the simple idea of the meeting of West and East symbolized by the bridge. It aims at invoking a complicated and an ambivalent notion of ‘the sound of Istanbul’ . . . ” (Değirmenci, 2010, p. 264). Interviewing musicians and bands from various music genres, Akın elaborately depicts the city with its diverse cultures and lifestyles through sounds. The audience is also projected with the idea that such a “multiculturalism” can embody tensions as well as harmonies. This unravels culture itself as being highly dynamic, which is why the documentary critically questions the concepts of identity and culture (Rings, 2016, p. 11).

Likewise, such a notion of transgressing geographical boundaries and cultures is the case of many of his films, including the ones focused in this article. Akın pieces together sound and music with the urban living spaces of his characters, while embarking on the disintegration and fragmentation of borders in the storylines of his movies. Therefore, his cinematography engages in a more in-depth manner with the protagonists through sounds; hence, the uses of his urban spaces turn into geographies of emotion. For this reason, places, which can be also considered as territorial spaces, are tackled by multifaceted cultural and geographical crossings and engagements between the characters Akın employs. Correspondingly, we can reflect on these hybrid spaces, which Akın creates through his films, as emotional geographies, because they connect to places by means of sound and music, as well as the characters he puts into use by means of his cinematography.

For instance, in his documentary movie Crossing the Bridge, the director questions the boundaries of East and West. In this documentary, Murat Uncuoğlu, an acknowledged underground DJ particularly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, speaks initially by underlying that a person who has grown up or lives in Istanbul is automatically open to various sounds from different geographies. He also states that a person/musician in the United States would be more parochial and limited to her or his local area in terms of sound and music. Richard Hamer, another musician in the documentary, criticizes the definitions and boundaries set around “East” and “West.” He underscores that the distinctions between these two geographical concepts are closely tied with ongoing relations of power, and do not exist as objective categories (see also Hall, 1995, 2003).

John Urry (2007) states that “place should not be thought of as an abstract Cartesian space that can be defined by various geometric coordinates. Rather places are centres of many material activities . . . ” (p. 79). For Urry, places are emotionally pleasurable, as a consequence of the incorporation of visuality when elaborating on place. In other words, the significance of landscape becomes substantial for him. Thus, he highlights the visual consumption of place and the pleasures derived from it, which is achieved through the involvement of emotions. This makes almost all places for Urry to be “toured,” hence involving emotions. For him, the pleasure acquired from places comes partly with the visual consumption of them (Urry, 2007, p. 82).

In a similar manner, one could pinpoint the noteworthiness of how affective experiences influence the way we both perceive the world and thus reconstruct geographies. In this respect, Fatih Akın’s visual soundscape geographies are emotionally striking, shocking, desiring, discovering, identity-questioning, and territory blurring. The spaces that he generates through his cinematography include such emotions, which he uses to locate subjectivities in space. These in turn provide places where the protagonists are in mobility. Such mobility constructs and reconstructs personal, social, national, political, and/or economic identities, which are never fixed and constantly on the move, as they are under question through the affective experiences of the protagonists. It is in such a context where the sounds and music of Fatih Akın’s films underscore such emotions, which his characters encounter mainly in the urban landscapes of the director’s visual and aural imagery of places. Such imageries embody both real and imagined experiences, which after all are also entangled.

In Akın’s (2004) film Head-On, his first worldwide success, one can note his presentation of the spatial and temporal transition between the two cities, Hamburg and Istanbul (Göktürk, 2010, p. 188). Furthermore, Akın utilizes the issue of self-destruction through the male protagonist Cahit who has distanced himself from his Turkish background and therefore cannot speak Turkish well, who has a suicidal background, and who loves punk and rock music as well as cocaine. His apartment in Hamburg is as dirty and messy as a pig’s hole. One night in his car, he attempts to commit suicide by stepping on the accelerator and crashes into the wall, later opening up his eyes in a hospital.

Just shortly after this incident, he meets Sibel, the female protagonist of the film, while waiting for his doctor at the rehabilitation center to call him. Just after getting out of the doctor’s room, Akın sort of surprises his viewers through the character of Sibel, who has also tried to kill herself and therefore is too staying in the same rehabilitation center. She runs toward Cahit, whom she has never met before and says, “You’re Turkish aren’t you? Please marry me.” Cahit in his cool manner rebuffs her in slang and goes away hurriedly. The spectator realizes Sibel’s insistence in marriage is only because she wants get free from her family and marrying a Turkish man is her only escape.

Going back to the spatial transitions in Fatih Akın’s films, Head-On is characterized by such transitions between the cities of Hamburg and Istanbul. As Cahit, after getting out of jail, goes to Istanbul to find Sibel, one immediately becomes aware of the sea, the Bosphorus Bridge, and the cosmopolitan city with the busy and colorful sideboards at the Beyoğlu area in Istanbul. Akın utilizes space playfully, under various categories in my view, in almost all of his films. Music is one of the crucial creators of space, the everyday places, and emotional situations of his characters in his films, and these are thoroughly emphasized through music. Akın applies music and sounds so eclectically, from punk-rock music, to jazz and soul, to hip-hop, to electronic, to traditional as well as alternative Turkish music. Hence, the everyday lived spaces of the characters and the spatial transitions are accompanied by the director’s sophisticated taste for variety of musical genres. As Berghahn (2006) underscores, sampling may be one of the key elements for Akın’s success. As it is cited here, the director himself has expressed in an interview that he is a kid of hip-hop culture, which means in this case that he can sample what he needs and leave out what he does not (p. 144).

In Head-On, for instance, the film opens up with an orchestra of a gypsy band in front of Istanbul’s Bosphorus Bridge where a woman sings a traditional love song called “Saniye’m.” This should be seen as the chorus of the movie as it appears a few more times throughout the film. However, as previously said, while Cahit is in the car trying his failed suicide attempt, he listens to Depeche Mode’s song “I Feel You.” In various scenes one can hear the song of Nick Cave ² to the West Berliner experimental group Einstürzende Neubauten. Consequently, as Polona Petek (2007) underlines:

the film does move beyond both the premature complacency of the advocates of multiculturalism as well as the equally premature resignation of its detractors; and it does so through its soundtrack, which functions as the film’s principal mode of social critique, self-interrogation and, indeed, multicultural mobilization. (p. 182)

His 2000 movie In July (Im Juli; Akın, 2000) is different in style as it also imports elements from romantic comedy films but definitely carrying a profound uniqueness of its own. Akın uses images where the characters are smoking marijuana as well as his reflection of a youth subculture where dreadlocks, colorful clothing, jazzy funk and reggae music, and the Mayan symbol of the sun are important signifiers. One of the main underlying preoccupations of the director in this film seems to be the idea of “borders.” I view this film as standing for Akın’s own transnational imaging of the world and his preoccupation with questions such as passports, borders, and the reasons for restrictions on crossing territories.

Moreover, like in his film Head-On, Fatih Akın reflects the utopia where he crosses borders to achieve a better place that is symbolized with the city of Istanbul. Correspondingly, the male protagonist Daniel, who is a shy school teacher with a routine life in Hamburg, one day buys a ring with a Mayan sun symbol from a street vendor called Juli (July). Juli tells Daniel that he will find his true love guided by this ring, and that he will recognize that person because she too will have the same Mayan symbol of the sun. However, Juli, who herself fancies Daniel, believes that in the end he will understand this person is Juli herself.

Later on, Daniel falls in love with a mysterious Turkish woman named Melek (“Angel” in Turkish), from Berlin, who comes to his town wearing a t-shirt and a loose skirt with sun patterns on. Melek leaves for Istanbul, and Daniel being so charmed by her, as he believes the sun patterns on her clothes signifies her as the chosen one, decides to catch up with her in Istanbul.

It is after this incident that the road trip begins in Hamburg, passes through Bavaria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and then finally ends in Istanbul. In the beginning of his road trip while in the car, Daniel coincidently sees Juli who is hitchhiking. The paths of Juli and Daniel will intersect from time to time and in the end of the film, Daniel will realize that his so called “sun” that he was searching for was not Melek but Juli herself.

As Nigel Thrift (2004) underscores, cities can be viewed as the whirlpool of affect; especially emotions such as anger, happiness, joy, fear are all immersed within and arise immensely in cities, either on a grand scale or within events of everyday life (p. 57). Likewise, Davidson and Milligan (2007, p. 524) highlight that geographical studies have come to accept the importance of emotion. They argue that although emotions may seem less obvious when one moves out from the issue of the body, as if they are less relevant to the studies of home, community, city, and so on, the significance of emotions around these topics is still high.

In this respect, Akın skillfully reflects on the depths of his characters’ personalities and emotions by bringing together a multiplicity of identities. Through his cinematography not only does he reflect in a more profound manner the traditional cultural background of a specific immigrant community and the restraints it places on the individual, but he also illustrates the encounters and interactions of different characters from distinct cultural backgrounds. This is even visible in the multiple-identities of a single protagonist as well, which is reflective of how Akın tries to portray the multidimensional influences of a person growing up in a cityscape that embraces a multiple background of communities with different histories and traditions. This goes beyond the one-dimensional representations of people and their communities, transcending the preconceived judgments constructed either through political discourse or ethnocentrism in daily life.

In other words, Akın, having directed, written, and produced multifarious films belonging to different genres, is successful in portraying the examples of prejudice, discrimination, and quick judgment on migrant minorities one comes across in everyday city life. Nonetheless, he breaks through such hearsay by presenting the audience with the rich emotional depths of his protagonists. In addition, he also opens up new, hybrid spaces where protagonists from different cultural upbringings come into contact with each other, thus reflecting on lifestyles and backgrounds that at first glance stand in contrast to those of the protagonists. The encounters and reflections of these characters, and the events thus taking place in Akın’s cinematography, are highly intensified by the eclectic soundtrack of his films.

In Fatih Akın’s first full-length feature film, Short Sharp Shock, the main characters “Costa,” “Gabriel,” and “Bobby” are respectively from Greek, Turkish, and Serbian family backgrounds, and they are three close friends with “criminal” personas. In the beginning of the film, Gabriel is seen being released from prison and is met by his family who is Turkish. His devout Muslim father slaps him as a sign of paternal authority before embracing his son, thus showing Gabriel he is accepted back to the family. The viewer also sees a praying father—a representation that, as Rob Burns (2007b) indicates, “comes perilously close to the figure of the speechless Turk propagated by ‘guestworker literature’ and the ‘cinema of the affected’” (p. 12). With the “cinema of affected,” Rob Burns (2007a) addresses the growth and recognition of the diasporic literature in the 1980s, involving the profound effect of the Turkish German authors who also influenced the migrant filmmakers (p. 362).

Accordingly, the Gastarbeiter or guest worker experience was worked up in filmmaking. However, starting from the 1990s there emerged a new generation of filmmakers whose work, to quote Rob Burns (2007a), “is above all notable for the sustained attempt to dismantle rather than recycle cultural stereotypes and to open up a ‘third space’ between the celebration and the denial of otherness” (pp. 365-366). Although these groups of filmmakers are rather heterogeneous in their filmmaking, they still share a common incentive in their desire to break away from the earlier dominant images that portrayed the migrant Turks as victims.

Fatih Akın, a successful filmmaker who portrays such a situation, underlined in one of his interviews that he began to make his own movies because he was reluctant toward those film productions where migrants could only appear as a “problem.” Rather, as he explained, he saw his growing up in two cultures to be an advantage and enunciated as follows: “I do not have to transmit a message of tolerance or deny one of my cultures. I simply link them –in my person and in my films” (Burns, 2007b, p. 11). These words of Fatih Akın can be observed in his films by the way he depicts a peculiar persona in almost all of his film characters. It is as if the ethnic and sociocultural features remain secondary compared to the emotional depth of the characters he employs. In other words, one gets the feeling as though Akın has the urge to underline the complexity and uniqueness of his protagonists’ characters, which people in real life may sometimes become blind to as a result of their apriori prejudices and categorizations.

Furthermore, I would argue that the transitions of music and sound, which act as an intensified background for the emotional output of Akın’s films and cinematographic skills, overlap with a “postnational” idea of Europe. As Thomas Elsaesser (2005) explains through is concept of double occupancy:

our identities are multiply defined, multiply experienced, and can be multiply assigned to us, at every point in our lives . . . Blood and soil, land and possession, occupation and liberation have to give way to a more symbolic or narrative way of negotiating contested ownership of both place and time . . . (p. 109)

Thus, Elsaesser (2005) pinpoints that literature, music, filmmaking, popular television shows, and so forth have become spheres where identities have been contested, just as in the case of Turkish immigrant identities in Germany—that is, the German Turkish. Popular culture in this regard has become a space where discourses on history and memory have also been invented and reinvented. Therefore, Fatih Akın’s filmmaking is considered to crosscut and hyphenate ethnic borders, which is why Elsaesser underlines rethinking Europe as postnational where one should instead reconsider the possibility for postnational subjectivities (Siewert, 2008, p. 198).

Conclusion: Music and Sounds as a Means of Fatih Akın’s Utopic Vision

In concluding, I would like to highlight that Akın, through the deep and rich emotional layers of his protagonists, as well as the urban spaces and aural architecture of his films, creates spaces for his audience to question identity politics and the closed borders inflicted by fortress Europe. By reflecting on European politics and beyond, which have been always otherizing and discriminating toward certain social groups, Akın skillfully turns urban spaces into places which are full of affect and emotion. It is his extensive taste and understanding of contemporary music and urban youth subcultures that convey his worldview through his films in a creative way—full of emotive euphoria and desire for a better world.

Recalling Winnicott, we can say that Akın’s films are representative of such utopias of pluralism and diversity. Nonetheless, his sampling of music and sounds of various cultures are sometimes projected through dystopia as much as utopia. Whatever the case, his films can be considered to form the third area, as they are spaces consolidating the search for “security” as they deal with identity politics through critically interrogating the notions of “we,” “us,” “they,” “other(s),” “European,” “non-European,” and so forth (see also Berghahn & Sternberg, 2010, pp. 16-17). In other words, Akın’s films open up an area where the spectator can empathize, as well as question, both the diasporic/immigrant and the mainstream cultures through ruptures and reconciliations.

Music can be considered a powerful tool for reorganizing the affective relationship between the spectator and the film, bringing forth a more profound presence (Siewert, 2008, p. 201). Music functions for the spectator as a bridge, whose experience in life with extreme situations is usually nothing like what they see in Akın’s movies. Yet for Siewert (2008), in Akın’s films these situations take place in spaces that seem very familiar for the spectator, making the emotional states of the protagonists to be perceived with both ecstasy and agony. Just like other European films such as Trainspotting, “the protagonists escape the binary narrative of either succeeding or failing; they are neither rebels or conformists; instead they can be seen as survivors, who live a life with risky cutting-edge experiences . . . ” (Siewert, 2008, p. 205).

Such a cutting-edge experience can also be seen in his 2017 film In the Fade (Akin, 2017), where this time the theme rests on questioning the far right and neo-Nazi ideology in Germany. One can get the viewpoint of contemporary debates on Islam and terrorism in line with fascist ideas and groups, where both ideologies feed into and recreate each other in the supposedly “multicultural” urban landscape such as that of the city of Hamburg where the story takes place.

This time the main protagonist Katja, a blonde German woman, is happily married to a rehabilitated ex-drug dealer Nuri who is of Turkish Kurdish descent and has served his time in prison. Nuri, after getting clean and getting out of prison, has built a career by opening up an office in a middle-class neighborhood of Hamburg engaging in translations, tax preparations, as well as serving as a travel agency. Earlier in the movie, the camera gives the picture of a happy, settled and loving family at Nuri’s office with Katja and their son Rocco who is aged six. However, not long after Katja leaves Rocco with his father to go to the Turkish baths with her friend, such a pleasant and loving atmosphere is shattered into pieces when a bomb blasts close by Nuri’s office killing both him and Rocco (Tartıcı, 2018).

Here Fatih Akın blurs the boundaries again by questioning the idea that a terrorist is necessarily someone who is Muslim and has associations with militant groups such as ISIS. This is a contemporary debate focused on the snap judgments people make in the Western world after a big blast or attack. The film criticizes this way of thinking by bringing into view Katja’s fight to reveal the neo-Nazi organization in Germany ³ and its ties with the Greek Nazis, with the help of a lawyer who is potentially of immigrant descent. Nevertheless, the film ends with the shocking event where Katja traces the two members of the Nazi organization who had been directly involved in the deaths of her beloveds all the way to Greece. Here Katja, after seeing them go inside, enters their caravan in the beach and blasts her bomb vest just like a suicide bomber, which eventually puts an end to her suffering.

The soundtrack of In the Fade was compiled by Josh Homme from the rock band Queens of the Stone Age. Fatih Akın in an interview explained that while working on writing the script of this film, he was listening to a lot of the music of this band. He underlined that he had thought this could also be the music his protagonist Katja was listening to, as he found the music of the Queens of the Stone Age to have an attitude of self-destruction, whilst thinking this film also had a similar spirit. Akın thus sent the early version of his film to Josh Homme, who immediately contacted him saying that he loved and was blown away by it (Tartıcı, 2018).

In this regard, Akın’s films, through their music, reflect the emotional intensity of his characters. The subjectivities displayed by his characters are depicted in an intense manner as a result of the sensations created by music. In other words, the music and sounds in Akın’s films bolster a “to-your-face” attitude of how the director conveys his messages in his cinematography that rests on the xenophobic political discourses and events of Europe and beyond.