Tackling volatile issues ‘Head-On’

Filmmaker Fatih Akin, whose new film “Head-On” opens tomorrow in Los Angeles, is of Turkish descent and was raised in Germany. He takes a more willful view of national pride, though.

“It’s like hip-hop,” Akin said recently by phone from his hometown of Hamburg. “I sample what I need and what I don’t need I don’t use. I love Turkey, but Germany is my home. I don’t have the burden of a Nazi past, but at the same time I am really proud of Goethe and Kant.”

The volatility of mixed cultures and the lot of immigrants are the emotional core of “Head-On,” about two soul-damaged Turkish Germans -- a suicidal middle-aged alcoholic (Birol Unel) and a reckless young woman (Sibel Kekilli) -- who agree to a sham marriage to help her escape a strict Muslim home.

The raucous, darkly funny, unpredictable emotional minefield that follows -- think Billy Wilder crossed with “Sid and Nancy” -- has defied the odds for a Turkish German film, claiming the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear Award last year, the European Film of the Year prize and five German Lolas -- that country’s Academy Awards equivalent. It also broke mainstream box office records in Germany.

This is Akin’s fifth film -- his others include a road movie romance called “Im Juli” and a story about Italians in Germany called “Solino” -- but it’s the first he produced as well. That gave him the freedom to take risks like veering from punkish comedy to violent drama and sadness.

“I think the toughest tragedy has to bring people to laughter, and vice versa,” says Akin, 31. The idea wasn’t to be provocative but to chart the journey of two extreme characters. “We never thought about reactions. We focused on the love story, how both are in a quest to find their own peace, their own middle [ground].”

With wide acclaim and awards, though, came tabloid sensationalism after the discovery of lead actress Sibel Kekilli’s past in pornographic films, a fact her traditional Muslim family didn’t know about. The German press kept the story alive for months. Akin publicly called the coverage racist -- “they wouldn’t do it if she were German,” he says -- and hypocritical, considering Germany’s huge adult film industry.

“It was bizarre,” Akin says. “They would write, ‘How could she do these films?’ and then have links to porn. This was a double morality, stuff the film is about.”

The other irony was that Unel’s full frontal nudity in “Head-On” -- which Akin says is a first for a Turkish man in mainstream film -- was treated like a breakthrough in Turkey. “For them, it was not a culture shock, but a sexual revolution,” Akin says. “[They] consider this a Turkish film, not a German film. Turkish Cosmopolitan chose Birol Unel for the sexiest man of the year.”

The Turkish community in Germany was divided, however, by the film’s graphic but not pornographic sexuality and its satiric attitude toward oppressive notions of family honor. But Akin stresses that Germany’s immigrant population of 2.2 million Turks, created by an influx of guest workers in the ‘60s and ‘70s, is by and large more conservative than those in the motherland. “They came from the countryside, and were not so educated, so they try to force tradition, while Turkey has changed so much,” Akin says. “This is very sad.”

Akin calls his own upbringing “nontypical” in that his mother and father -- who immigrated to Hamburg before his birth -- nurtured a “crazy, funny and open-minded” family that always supported his efforts to become a filmmaker.

He says he’s trying to get away from early cinematic influences that include Martin Scorsese but admits that “Head-On” is an homage to the Turkish cinema he watched as a youth with his parents.

These were socially conscious films of the ‘70s and ‘80s and include the work of the late, controversial director Yilmaz Guney, an oft-imprisoned Communist who directed “Yol,” co-winner of the 1982 Cannes Palme d’Or, by proxy from a jail cell.

One of the many projects on Akin’s plate is a biopic of Guney.

“His widow asked me to make it,” Akin says. “He is the man.”

“Head-On” has given Akin the momentum to make a lot of different movies, but one unforeseen consequence of a film’s international success is how it keeps a restless artist from realizing all the ideas in his head.

Akin was hoping to have the documentary he recently filmed, “Crossing the Bridge” -- which explores Istanbul’s music scene from punk to gypsies to traditional Sufi performers -- ready for this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

But “Head-On” shows no signs of slowing down, so interviews like these -- and chats with the press in Australia, Brazil and Norway, where the film is now opening -- keep interrupting.

“To sell the film to 60 countries, to have distributors all over the world who are interested in my next work, I always wanted to reach that, you know?” says Akin. “But I never expected that with ‘Head-On.’ I always thought this was a small, dirty, personal film and nobody would care for it. I was surprised and glad it reached so many people.”