Film screening
Elbow

Achtung Film!

10/23/2024
7:00pm
6:00 PM EDT Cinémathèque québécoise, Montréal

Based on the award-winning novel Ellbogen by Fatma Aydemir, Aslı Özarslan’s debut feature is a skillfully crafted and intense portrait of a young woman struggling to hold her ground in a society that seems to cast her aside.

ELBOW
Ellbogen
Dir. Aslı Özarslan
Germany, 2024
86 min.

With Melia Kara, Jamilah Bagdach, Asya Utku, Nurgül Ayduran, Jale Arikan, Mina Özlem Sağdiç, Doğa Gürer, Ercan Karaçayli

17-year-old Hazal is a Turkish-German teen living in Berlin and dreaming of a future outside of her parents’ bakery. Despite her best efforts to find an apprenticeship, her mediocre grades and numerous rejected applications leave her with few options. For her 18th birthday she wants to escape the everyday grind and hit the clubs with her friends. But the night’s celebration is cut short when the girls are turned away by a bouncer. On their way in the subway, they are harassed by a stranger and the situation escalates, with deadly consequences.
 

Elbow premiered in the “Generations” section of 74th Berlinale and has won multiple awards since then, including the 2024 Frankfurter Buchmesse Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
  Aslı Özarslan was born in Berlin. She studied theatre and media at the University of Bayreuth, philosophy and sociology at the Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), and documentary film directing at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. In 2009, she directed her first short film; in 2012, she created the 11-minute video installation Kanak Sprak Bist Du, about the German dialect spoken by young people in multiethnic communities, for the Humboldt Box. Her 2014 film Insel 36 and her 2016 graduation film Dil Leyla won numerous national and international awards.

Fatma Aydemir, born in Karlsruhe, lives in Berlin and works as a journalist, publicist, and editor. Her debut novel Ellbogen was published by Hanser in 2017 and won the Klaus Michael Kühne Prize and the Franz Hessel Prize for best authorial debut. In 2019 she co-edited the anthology Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum with Hengameh Yaghoobifarah. Aydemir’s second novel Dschinns was published by Hanser in 2022 and was shortlisted for the German Book Prize. An English translation by Jon Cho-Polizzi was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in September 2024.