Use the search bar to find projects, completed films, and TFL community members.

Projects

The Dark Ship

Kidnapped by jihadists, Kerim is trained to suicide bomber. He escapes but the memories remain.

synopsis

After arriving in Berlin, Kerim (22) starts an asylum seeking process with the help of uncle Tarek. Kerim tells the officer, in a very convincing way, that he has been kidnapped and imprisoned by a Jihadist Group back home in Iraq, but the officer does not believe him at all. Later, Kerim finds his first friends in Germany among a group of second-generation young hip- hoppers. After a while, they want to know more about his time in Iraq. Lonely and flattered by their interest, Kerim tells them that he was not only kidnapped, but had stayed with the group for almost a year, before he fled. Especially Amir, one of the young guys, wants to know more about this. Kerim is torn between his new friends’ admiration and the authority that mistrusts him; he does not want to talk about his past where religion and violence play a role, but he has to do it; he wants to get the asylum permit but at the same time gets depressed about the West. He finds a girl but he has the feeling she is cheating on him. Kerim is lost, until Amir disappears into an Islamist group and he has the feeling he has to act to get him out.

Director’statement

In my documentaries I have very often been dealing with characters and stories of migration and identity seeking, among them also stories of political and religious radicalization. “Who am I?”, “Where do I belong?”, etc., are questions that interest me strongly. Maybe this is because of my own background coming from an ethnical border-region. The Dark Ship is going to be a post-modern adventure film, a film that goes inside the schizophrenia of our world, set between Europe and Iraq, between a Jihadist group and a family without a father, between a spiritual asylum seeker and second generation immigrant kids in Europe longing for something to believe in. All this is reflected deeply in a single young man’s mind and feelings; Kerim, a smart youngster, who in his short life always seems to get into trouble. A film that’s told on different time levels and in different locations, reconstructing Kerim’s life from its end.

TFL PROGRAMME:
ScriptLab 2011
Discover more details here:
Download
PDF
TFL Catalogue 2011

All the updates once a month in your mailbox, subscribe to the TFL newsletter.