006: Personal Journey: Part 2

Gaining Experience in the Film Industry before Applying to Film Schools in Germany

The main reason I sneaked onto the set of The Pianist, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, was to visit the Konrad Wolf Film University in Babelsberg and learn about the application criteria. The alternative school I was planning to apply to was the German Film and TV Academy (DFFB), located in central Berlin. Both schools required applicants to be at least 21 years old and to submit proof of experience in the film industry. At the time, I was only 19 years old and didn’t have any experience besides the TURSAK film seminars and the NYFA summer school at Universal Studios, LA.

Despite this, I still wanted to move to Berlin to gain the experience required for German film schools, rather than staying in Istanbul. With an Abitur, the German high school diploma, I registered for Old German Literature at Humboldt University primarily for visa purposes and planned to look for internships in the film industry. I was attending many lectures at the university—perhaps too many. My level of German was ok, but Old German was another challenge altogether. In some lectures, I felt as if my German classmates and I were learning a foreign language together. On top of that, I was learning Sanskrit. I remember having an epiphany during one of those Sanskrit lectures, when an older classmate shared her story of escaping the Nazis with a Polish Jewish family. It struck me that I needed to spend less time at the university and focus more on meeting filmmakers and seeking internship opportunities to gain the experience required for film school applications.

Thanks to a journalist friend of mine, I ended up sneaking into Berlinale interviews and parties by simply covering the image on someone else’s press accreditation card. It was the year when German-Turkish director Fatih Akin’s movie Gegen die Wand (Head-On) won the Best Picture award. I found myself at the award celebration party where Fatih Akin was DJ’ing. After a few small talks with some people at the party, I even secured my first serious internship opportunity for a high-budget TV movie production, consisting of two 90-minute episodes.

The movie Zeit der Wünsche (Time of the Wishes) was being shot on Super16mm, with a story set between the 1960s and 1980s. It revolved around four friends from the same Anatolian village who end up in Germany as guest workers and go through many hardships. The entire team, both on the production side and the cast, was quite remarkable. The only caveat was that I needed to move to Cologne instead of staying in Berlin. Of course, I did that, after leaving my apartment to some friends who were supposed to decorate my home with furniture instead of paying rent. (That part didn’t go as planned; those friends had a fight with each other, and the apartment was a mess when I returned. But that’s another story I’d rather not delve into.)

I started working in the Cologne office as a production trainee and quickly became an important part of the crew by trying to help every department as a curious young cinephile who was just happy to be part of such a big film without costing the production anything 😊. During the entire production, I visited many places in Germany where the shoots took place, such as Oberhausen, Münster, and München. I even froze my university registration and continued with the team for the Türkiye shoots in Istanbul and Cappadocia. That whole adventure took around six months in total, and to this day, it remains the best learning experience I’ve had in filmmaking.

few years later, I wasn't a student at either the Konrad Wolf Film School or DFFB, but I studied at the SAE Institute Berlin’s Digital Animation and Film Department. I completed my studies with a well-received short film and a thesis paper on how cultural differences in the crew of a big-budget film production can have both advantages and disadvantages, with many anecdotes from my Zeit der Wünsche experience, where the Turkish and German crews were both helping and sabotaging each other due to their differing mentalities.

To be continued…

Thanks for reading this far. Feel free to share your thoughts, and take care.