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Director's Statement
A few years ago, an Austrian taxi driver told me he was surprised to have a person like me in his cab for once, despite the fact he had picked me up in a “foreigners’ district”. Otherwise, it was all “Turks” and “Orientals” here. I contradicted him and told him that my background was also that of a migrant. He looked at me in the rear-view mirror. The ride fell silent. I took an Uber right afterwards, where a Kurd drove me and said that Kurdistan was much nicer and warmer than Vienna. He longed for his homeland. Everything there was organic and full of love. I said I was also Kurdish. He wanted to speak Kurdish to me. I couldn’t answer him. I don’t know the language. He was shocked that I, as a Kurdish woman, couldn’t speak Kurdish. This trip also became quiet. That’s why the film SONNE came about. Because I don’t belong anywhere. And also, because I had several Austrian girlfriends who were better than me at Kurdish lessons, looked better than me in headscarves, and had a fetish for always falling in love with refugees. My beginnings in film and art revolved around self-expression and the search for belonging. Failure in searching for all this played a role in many of my works. In SONNE I tried to mix all that with smartphone and Social Media Videos. I love the aesthetics and melancholy of these videos – they take a slice of life and stick it out there in the big wide world of the internet forever, where it will probably stay in the Cloud and on some server somewhere longer than we will live.