Something like the Turkish-German equivalent of East is East combined with its upcoming sequel West is West, the bittersweet comedy
Almanya - Willkommen In Deutschland (Almanya - Welcome to Germany) follows both the immigrant experience for Turks coming into Germany in the 1960s as well as a reluctant family trip back to the homeland, as second and third generation immigrants discover their heritage at the behest of an ageing patriarch - a former 'guest worker', now a German citizen and the focus of this story. The film is riotously funny from the outset, with broad physical comedy and exaggerated characterisations working to make a lot of satirical points, often using national stereotyping. The difference between this and an episode of Top Gear though is that Welcome to Germany almost certainly has its heart in the right place and uses these stereotypes to play up the stupidity of stereotypes themselves. The Germans and Turks we see in the film are living in a campy, heightened reality where Turkish children dream of being binmen (and binwomen) and where Germans do nothing but eat sausage. This farcical element is allowed to work due to the warmth and genuine emotion invested in the scenes between the various family members, and I have to admit that I shed a tear or two. (Not a fact I'd usually be embarrassed by, but Welcome to Germany is so frothy and high-spirited that getting a bit weepy felt ever so ridiculous.) It also works because director and writer
Yasemin Samdereli mixes in archive news footage at various points to put her story in the context of mass migration to Turkey, which shows how the government actively brought these workers in to help drive the 'economic miracle' - a fact which is all too easily forgotten by politicians now who wish to see Germany become a less culturally diverse country.
Many scenes overtly parody Chancellor Merkel's 2010 speech (since echoed in the UK by David Cameron) that multiculturalism has "failed" in Germany, the best of these scenes being the brilliantly bizarre dream sequence in which a man is only given his new German passport on the condition that he accepts "German culture" as his culture. This apparently involves "taking every second holiday in Mallorca", wearing lederhosen and joining a shooting club - light-hearted jabs at German culture that went down really well with the predominantly German audience who spontaneously applauded many of the film's gags. The film is a crowd pleaser and the sort of movie that could be described as "heartwarming". Perhaps this will rule it out of the main prize in competition as I suspect it was just too fun to be allowed to win. The last twenty minutes goes on for too long and gets a bit too cloying and cheesy, but the bulk of it is consistently amusing, imaginative and heartfelt, whilst also saying much about the relationship between German national identity and the country's huge Turkish population.