Shirins Hochzeit (1976)

The film depicts the life of Shirin, a young Turkish woman played by Ayten Erten. As a child, she was promised in marriage to Mahmut. One day, however, her father throws a stone at the manager he works for and is arrested. The manager asks Shirin’s uncles for her hand, and they agree to his proposal in exchange for money. But Shirin does not love him and longs for Mahmut, who lives and works in Cologne. She flees to Germany to look for him. There, she initially works in a factory and meets Maria, a Greek woman who becomes her friend. When she is laid off, she experiences the harsh life of a “female guest worker” in “a society hostile to them” (Lexikon des internationalen Films, 1995 book edition). Shirin regularly sends money home. She works as a cleaner, but loses that job too after being raped. While looking for work, she falls in with a pimp who offers her as a prostitute in guest-worker hostels. There she encounters Mahmut, the fiancé she has been searching for so long, but in the darkness he does not recognize her. Eventually, the pimp is stabbed to death by his cronies, and she witnesses the killing. Shortly afterward, as she prepares to leave out of longing for her homeland, she is shot from behind.