Forty Square Meters of Germany
Tevfik Başer, born in 1951 in Çankırı, Turkey, is a film director, producer and screenwriter. After completing his high school education in Eskişehir, Turkey, he moved to London in 1973 where he got an education in graphic design, photography and set design. Five years later, he moved back to Eskişehir to work as a camera operator and graphic designer before, in 1980, moving again, this time to Hamburg. Up until 1987, Başer studied film at HFBK, making his directorial debut in documentary film on the lives of Turkish immigrant workers while studying (“Zwischen Gott und Erde”, “Between God and Earth,” 1983).1
Başer is best known for his first feature film “40 m² Deutschland” (“Forty Square Meters of Germany”) released in 1986. It won several prestigious awards, the Silver Leopard at Locarno Film Festival, the best debut film award the following year at International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the UNESCO Award from Cannes Film Festival. The film was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival Berlinale the same year.2 The entire film was shot in a 40 m2 apartment in Hamburg and follows the story of Turna who was brought to Hamburg from a little town in Anatolia by her guest worker husband Dursun. Fearing that Turna might get lost in the big city, Dursun doesn’t allow his wife to leave their apartment, limiting her life and experience to the eponymous 40 square meters. Başer’s movie pre-dates “Gegen Die Wand” (“Head-On”), maybe the best-known film centering on a Turkish woman immigrant, by 24 years. By the way: Its director Fatih Akın also studied film at HFBK.3
The other films by Tevfik Başer also met with great critical acclaim. “Abschied vom Falschen Paradies” (“Farewell to False Paradise”), released in 1989, won Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role at German Film Awards (Deutscher Filmpreis) and was nominated for Outstanding Feature Film in the same year following its release. “Lebewohl, Fremde” (“Goodbye, Stranger”) was screened at Cannes Film Festival in the “Un Certain Regard” section in 1991.4
Tevfik Başer continued his career in academia, serving, from 1991 to 2003, as an associate professor at the Film Academy of Baden-Württemberg. He also acted as a lecturer at Ankara’s Beykent University (from 1999 to 2003). From 2003 on, Başer has held the position of a lecturer at Kadir Has University, Istanbul, where he still lives.5 An unofficial gossip site has it that he loves sipping wine at his flat in the historic neighborhood of Galata, Istanbul.6