40 Square Meters of Germany (40 Metrekare Almanya)

Directed by Tevfik Başer from his own screenplay, this 1986 West German drama is regarded as one of the first widely noticed films by a director of Turkish origin in Germany. Turna, a young woman who has never left her village before, arrives in Hamburg with her new husband Dursun and finds herself shut inside a sunless forty-square-metre flat. Deeply attached to conservative values and distrustful of the unfamiliar society around him, Dursun forbids her to go out — he cannot even tolerate her talking to a little girl through the window. The tiny apartment becomes the only Germany she is allowed to know. Then Dursun suddenly dies, leaving Turna alone in a country whose language she does not speak, where she knows no one, and pregnant with his child. Starring Özay Fecht, Yaman Okay and Demir Gökgöl, the film portrays the era of labour migration to Germany through a story of isolation and a woman's freedom, and received several awards.