When We Leave (German: Die Fremde, Turkish: Ayrılık) is a 2010 German-Turkish drama film, produced, written and directed by Austrian filmmaker Feo Aladag.
The film stars Sibel Kekilli, Florian Lukas, Alwara Höfels, Nursel Köse, and Turkish actors Settar Tanrıöğen and Derya Alabora.
On 17 September 2010 the German selection committee chose When We Leave as its official entry in the competition for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
[1] Umay (Sibel Kekilli) lives with her husband Kemal (Ufuk Bayraktar) and son Cem (Nizam Schiller) in the suburbs of Istanbul.
Mehmet, Umay's older brother (Tamer Yigit), and Kader devise a plan to kidnap young Cem and take him back to his father in Istanbul.
Acar (Serhad Can) has earned a terrible fate; he's been elected to kill his beloved sister to restore his family's lost honor.
Aladag worked with an extremely diverse group of both trained and non-trained actors for the film, some of which came from street-casting sessions.
Nizam Schiller (Cem), Almila Bagriacik (Rana) and Serhad Can (Acar) all made their screen debut in the film.
All non-actors participated in an acting workshop which lasted several months, during which Aladag helped them learn from her experience in front of the camera.
Her research led her to a series of honor killings in Germany, mainly perpetrated against women who tried to free themselves from familial and social pressures.
Out of this passion came the desire to create a cinematic story that dealt with the fate of a young German woman of Turkish origins.
She researched police case files from the previous fifteen years and discovered similar patterns in them that helped her begin writing the screenplay.
She wanted to create an emotional, authentic but also universal story, without moral judgments and with the goal of showing not only the conflict, but also to empathetically portray the tragedy of the situation.
It is Bicycle Thief good, and the kind of movie I like the most: a simple yet meaningful story told without bells and whistles and with a small number of major characters.