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Bears Winner Meltem Kaptan: "I Love Making People Laugh"
Photo: Andreas Rentz / POOL / EPA
The competition for Meltem Kaptan was enormous at the 72nd Berlinale.
Not only was the competition characterized by many intense portraits of women, it was also above all a festival of the great mother figures.
Kaptan competed against stars of French cinema such as Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who in »La Ligne« as a family egomaniac has to deal with her system-breaking rabid daughter.
Or against Charlotte Gainsbourg and her sensitive portrait of a mother looking for a job and self-esteem in »Les Passagers des la Nuit«.
Or against the single Swiss woman Michéle Brand in the mountain drama »Drii Winter«, who has to look after her huge, sick husband instead of being able to lean on him.
The 41-year-old stand-up comedian from Cologne had a difficult time with her portrayal of the mother of the German-Turk Murat Kurnaz, who was innocently imprisoned in Guantanamo for five years in Andreas Dresen's film »Rabiye Kurnaz against George W. Bush«, which required a lot of political sensitivity .
It is all the more surprising that the festival jury chaired by US filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan on Wednesday evening in the Berlinale Palast awarded her the Silver Bear for best acting – for her first major leading role in a German film.
At the award ceremony, she thanked her parents, who had once immigrated to Germany from Turkey, for not asking her to study law or medicine, but for enabling her to pursue acting.
She dedicated the bears to the real Rabiye Kurnaz and all mothers whose love, according to Kaptan, is stronger than all borders.
It is this love that empowers Mama Kurnaz in Dresen's film to follow her fight for her son's freedom all the way to the US Supreme Court in Washington.
At her side is Bremen lawyer Bernhard Docke (Alexander Scheer), who counters Rabiye's exuberant vitality and naiveness with bone-dry Hanseatic precision and laconicism.
In the film, Kaptan's Rabiye babbles in a mixture of Turkish, German and a few scraps of English.
She speeds through Bremen at breakneck speed in a huge Mercedes, at first she cannot even pronounce the word Guantanamo, she keeps asking Docke with childish astonishment: »Really now?«, but then she presents herself as a self-confident lioness climbing out of the window of her house , when her husband doesn't want to let her travel to the USA again.
Screenwriter Laila Stieler also won a Berlinale Bear for her dialogues.
Combine lightness with depth
Dresen's film draws a lot of comedic and emotional power from this vibrant, massive super mom who Kaptan initially didn't want to make as funny as she said at the press conference after the award ceremony: It was the real Rabiye Kurnaz, who was just like her film character: »The lightness came from Rabiye, that's so typical for her«.
But there are also scenes in Dresen's film in which Kaptan can show depth, for example when she and her lawyer are sitting in a Washington bar and the TV above the counter is showing the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.
Docke carefully informs her that Murat was also tortured in Guantanamo – and Rabiye, who is otherwise so chatty, becomes very quiet and sad, only letting her pain, insecurity and fear work through a few gestures and looks.
"I love to make people laugh," Kaptan said on Wednesday, but she was an actress before her career as a comedian and is also very interested in combining lightness with depth in future roles.
"Life isn't always funny," she said.
Being able to show all of these facets in Dresen's film was good for her.
In the near future she might be able to play a German woman too, she joked in – very fluent – English: »Talking about integration, hahaha.«
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Meltem Kaptan grew up in the Gütersloh district and now lives in Cologne.
She studied acting and singing in Istanbul and Washington DC. She acted in musicals and was one of the founding members of the English Theater in Marburg.
Since the end of the noughties, she has performed stand-up comedy she wrote herself in numerous television and radio formats, including »Nightwash« and »Quatsch Comedy Club«.
Her theme is always the self-ironic breaking of German-Turkish clichés and peculiarities.
She is known to a larger TV audience as one of the hosts of the ARD comedy show »Ladies Night«.
She also presented the Sat.1 show »Das Große Backen« and in 2021 took over the Vox show »Erste Sahne – Who bakes the best?« Kaptan developed her own comedy character on the subject of reducing bureaucracy for the Federal Chancellery.
She played her first leading role in a film in 2017 in the Turkish production Ölümlü Dünya.
Director Andreas Dresen, with films such as "Halt auf freier Strecke" or "Gundermann" a specialist in opening up politically or socially difficult material to a larger audience, has long been looking for the right leading actress for his Kurnaz story.
Of course she needed a German-Turkish background, but it was much more important that she had to be able to carry the film energetically, he said in an interview about the film.
»A certain naivety was important, because that is what defines the beauty and strength of this character«.
Kaptan touched him during the first test shots.
"Even though she has no children of her own, one would like to have one like her for a mother."
Dresen counts his actress among the »changeover actresses«.
Sometimes it's loud and full of power, "other times it's totally permeable so that you can see the open heart beating.
You can't work something out by hand, you either have it or you don't.«
With this talent, Meltem Kaptan conquered the Berlinale jury and made a breakthrough into the serious film business.
She hadn't quite realized it herself on Wednesday evening.
"Do you know the word fever dream?" she asked at the press conference after the bear ceremony.
She has to process her surprising win for a few days.
It's like drinking a lot of alcohol and still not being able to comprehend what actually happened.
The press audience, no less intoxicated and hungover from the six days of the film festival, had her on her side again.