What remains of love
TO THE FILM
It is a rare stroke of luck when the political and the private are so cleverly interwoven as in the feature film by director and screenwriter Kanwal Sethi. The film tells the love story of Ilyas (Serkan Kaya) and Yasemin (Seyneb Saleh), two Germans of Turkish and Kurdish descent against the backdrop of faceless structural racism in our society. The leading roles are convincingly played by Serkan Kaya, Seyneb Saleh and Amira Demirkiran. It is a rare stroke of luck when the political and the private are so cleverly interwoven as in the feature film by director and screenwriter Kanwal Sethi. The leading roles are convincingly played by Serkan Kaya, Seyneb Saleh and Amira Demirkiran.
In WAS VON DER LIEBE BLEIBT, Kanwal Sethi skillfully combines an explosive socio-political topic with the touching love story of Ilyas and Yasemin. In his earlier films FERNES LAND and ONCE AGAIN – EINE LIEBE IN MUMBAI, he already demonstrated his flair for poetically narrating socially relevant themes. “It’s a movie about the doubts that every love knows, and at the same time about the discord that is injected like a poison by state authorities – and that puts Ilyas’ love for Yasemin to the test,” says director Kanwal Sethi. With WAS VON DER LIEBE BLEIBT, Kanwal Sethi succeeds in showing in a subtle way that systemic racism is also real for people with a migration biography in Germany’s bourgeois middle class. The injustice to which the people affected here are exposed is made tangible in this film, which does not point a finger and tells an authentic love story.
“WAS VON DER LIEBE BLEIBT is a love story – about a love that goes beyond death. At the same time, it is also a story about institutional, systemic racism that is faceless and firmly anchored in the center of society. It is a film about the doubts that every love knows, and at the same time about mistrust, which is injected like a poison by state authorities – and thus puts Ilyas’ love for Yasemin to the test. Ilyas’ story traces what happened to the NSU victims’ families and countless other victims of right-wing terrorism. We owe it to the victims that these fates are no longer ignored and doubted or dismissed as individual fates!” Director Kanwal Sethi
SYNOPSIS
Ilyas (Serkan Kaya) and Yasemin (Seyneb Saleh) have been lovers for fifteen years. Then something horrific happens: out of nowhere, Yasemin is shot dead by unknown assailants in an attack on her café. Ilya’s life and that of their daughter Senna (Amira Demirkiran) is falling apart at the seams. Ilyas loses his footing when he himself is suspected by the police and Yasemin is accused of leading a double life and supporting the banned PKK. The police are investigating, but they have no answers. The longer these suspicions continue, the more Ilyas asks himself: Was Yasemin really the woman he loved? What remains of love?
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