Cut the cliche

It seems Islam has become the concern of not just the mullahs but also of the Berlinale. Out of hundreds of stories screened at one of the most prestigious film festival of the world this year, many were about Muslims.

Leading the pack was Jasmila Zbanic, the Bosnian filmmaker, who returned with On The Path, four years after having won the Golden Bear, Berlinale's top prize, for Grbavica in 2006. Grbavica was about a woman forced to bear the child of a rapist soldier who assaulted her. On The Path is a passionate and sweet love story told in contemporary Sarajevo. All is well till the trauma of war catches up with the protagonist and in a desperate search for his identity he finds solace in the arms of a radical community of Wahabi Muslims.

The idea of the film was born after a man from the Wahabi sect refused to shake Zbanic hand in Sarajevo -because she is a woman. Her initial anger turned into curiosity and Zbanic spent many months researching the Wahabi communities in Bosnia whose influence has increased sincethe collapse of former Yugoslavia, after the end of the civil war inmid-1990s.

Zbanic has noticed a big change in post-war Bosnia. Many people have become more conservative, making the filmmaker wonder: why?

In On The Path, Zbanic explores the impact on the relationship of a young and loving Bosnian couple after the man begins to practise Islam in its extreme form. The story includes the reaction of the female protagonist. The pertinent question posed by Zbanic is complex: what does one do when one person in a relationship changes? Do you take his/her path or stay on your own. The filmmaker probes such characters in this marvellously enacted film. 

Born to Afghan parents but brought up in Germany, Burham Qurbani learnt the Lord's prayer before he could recite the fatiha, or shahada. Shahada, the debut film of Burham Qurbani, an Afghan German, also competing for the Golden Bear, deals with the life of three young Muslims in Berlin and their struggle to feel 'at home' in their daily life. The themes in Shahada are about culture, religion, homosexuality and the rights of women, particularly among Muslims. The filmmaker feels that his characters are like himself. They find themselves living within a culture, where they often feel they do not belong. Their identityis twisted and the contradictions in both cultures are often compelling.

When We Leave, a Turkish family drama, distances pre-Islamic customs like honour killings from the 'religion of Muslims'. Umay is a westernised young Muslim woman who has walked out with her five-year-old son on her husband who is a wife-beater. When her loving parents express more concern for what the neighbours will say about her rebellion and insist that Umay must return to her husband in Istanbul, she walks out on them too; that is, before her father fulfils his threat of murdering her.