RABIYE KURNAZ VS. GEORGE W. BUSH

Director's Statement

“I simply couldn’t believe that something like this was possible and happened in our time.” Andreas Dresen Q: Let’s go into your joint work on the material and begin with Rabiye Kurnaz – of course! Laila Stieler: The first meeting with Rabiye was already love at first sight. She’s not only a great person but also a gift for me as an author. Inspired by her appearance, the idea also emerged of linking the political background of her story with comic devices. My son had also just started puberty at the time and as a mother I increasingly grew into Rabiye’s perspective and could imagine the fears that arise when children start going their own ways. I liked this universal aspect from the start. Q: You mention the comic aspects of the story. So those weren’t just stylistic devices to strengthen the character of the mother, to bolster her cinematically? Laila Stieler: We didn’t need to mould or adjust anything. Rabiye made it easy for me to write about her. When we first met, she was still showing the marks of a serious illness, fragile, touching, and I didn’t know if we’d see each other again. When we met for the second time, a few months later, she drove up to the station in a sleek white Mercedes convertible. Then we sped through Bremen to loud electro-pop music. And then a few months later we were in a shisha bar with one of her sons, and she asked me when our film would finally be finished. That’s Rabiye. She keeps her spirits up. She has humour, strength, and is dazzlingly contradictory. If I think of her as chaste, she’s permissive. If I take her for naive, she’s smart. And if I consider her worldly, she‘s suddenly very pious. Rabiye has often turned my expectations of her upside down. “God is there to make life easy for us, honestly, Laila!“ she said to me once. What a sentence! Telling her story partly in a comic way appealed to me a lot, on the one hand because it’s something that’s not necessarily obvious with this theme, and on the other hand because it coincides with my attitude to life and telling stories. Q: It is admittedly reassuring that the humour in RABIYE KURNAZ VS. GEORGE W. BUSH is drawn from the real Rabiye. Meltem Kaptan shows herself to be very versatile, connecting the tragic and the comic, often in just tiny moments. A gift? Andreas Dresen: Yes! Meltem is a quick-change actress. Sometimes she’s loud and forceful, sometimes totally permeable, so that you see her open heart beating. A woman who puts her arms around the world and charges forward. A lioness! It’s not a technique you can train, you either have it or you don’t. Meltem also has a very good sense of timing when adapting the text and the character. In reality, she’s very different to Rabiye. Q: What is the most important question for you? Andreas Dresen: How can what happened to Murat Kurnaz and all the other people who were wrongly detained in Guantanamo, and are still being detained there today, be allowed to take place in our democracy? Q: RABIYE KURNAZ VS. GEORGE W. BUSH is by no means a victim film, although the family has of course become a victim. But one key aspect comes through: the way politics and society deals with victims is for the most part incomprehensibly defensive, sometimes presumptuous, and often downright shaming, regardless of whether it’s to do with abuse, persecution or terror. Why do you think this is? Andreas Dresen: I think it’s particularly the case if a society that has to deal with victims bears some of the responsibility itself. The Guantanamo system, which still exists after 20 years, is wrong per se. It is inconceivable! Democracy has failed on a grand scale in Kurnaz’s case, not only in the U.S. but clearly also in Germany and in Turkey. Murat Kurnaz spent five years caught in a border triangle, in a mesh of responsibilities constantly being pushed back and forth. It makes me angry how ignorantly the German government has behaved and behaves towards Murat Kurnaz and his family, how they refuse to issue an apology, let alone award compensation. No one wants to take responsibility. There’s a lot I can understand. They were complicated times back then after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. There was enormous pressure on politicians, and this resulted in a few hasty and incorrect decisions. We may grant politicians that, but what we shouldn’t grant them, in my view, is not to rectify what needs to be rectified based on better knowledge and in line with later findings. Laila Stieler: No one likes to assume the victims’ perspective. It would mean identifying with their powerlessness. This makes it all the more important in my opinion to present this position openly, to give this status a name. The press as fourth estate is playing an ambivalent role here. To some extent, they’re turning people into victims. How quickly prejudicial judgements are made! In this case, it was the “Bremen Taliban”, in the NSU case it was the “kebab murders”. On the other hand, without the press it wouldn’t have been possible for Bernhard Docke to generate so much publicity for Murat Kurnaz. When I was writing the screenplay, I often asked myself what I actually thought when I heard about him for the first time. Was I immediately appalled by what had happened to him? Or did I initially doubt his innocence? It’s not pleasant but very informative to catch yourself with your own bias. Maybe it’s the same for others, too. Excerpts from the discussion with writer Laila Stieler and director Andreas Dresen, conducted by journalist Andreas Körner in December 2021.