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LECCE 2015

Fatih Akin to be a guest of honour at Lecce

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- The German director of Turkish origin will be attending the film festival in Salento on 15 April, which is dedicating a retrospective of nine titles to him

Fatih Akin to be a guest of honour at Lecce
Director Fatih Akin

Together with Bertrand Tavernier, Fatih Akin will be one of the “Protagonists of European Cinema”, a section of the European Film Festival (Lecce, 13-18 April) run by Cristina Soldano and Alberto La Monica. Every year, this event, held in Salento, pays tribute to two leading figures of European cinema with retrospectives of their films, chosen with the directors themselves. 

The son of Turkish immigrants, Fatih Akin, born in Hamburg, was the first German director to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 19 years, with Head-On [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
in 2004. It was the first film in his trilogy on love, death and the devil, which continued with The Edge of Heaven [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Fatih Akin
interview: Klaus Maeck
film profile
]
in 2007 and concludes now, ten years later, with The Cut [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Fatih Akin
interview: Tahar Rahim
film profile
]
, which is due to be released in Italy by BIM on 9 April.

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At the European Film Festival, nine of the director’s films will be showcased as part of a retrospective curated by Massimo Causo. This will include the aforementioned trilogy as well as films that were never distributed in Italy, such as Akin’s debut film, Short Sharp Shock, from 1998, which was awarded prizes at both the Locarno International Film Festival and the Hamburg Film Festival; In July from 2000; and Polluting Paradise [+see also:
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film profile
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from 2012, a documentary exposé focusing on the fight of local inhabitants of the Turkish village of Çamburnu against the government’s decision to turn their community into a rubbish dump. 

The retrospective, which has been put together in collaboration with the Goethe Institut, is completed by Solino from 2002, a film shot in Salento and Germany that tells the story of a family that emigrates to Duisburg in the 1960s; Akin’s 2005 documentary Crossing the Bridge - The Sound of Istanbul [+see also:
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film profile
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, on the musical and cultural scene of Istanbul, a city that bridges East and West; and Soul Kitchen [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
, which was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the 2009 Venice Film Festival.

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(Translated from Italian)

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