IN THE 2011 FILM Almanya—Willkommen in Deutschland (Almanya— Welcome to Germany), Yasemin Şamdereli depicts a spectrum of complex human emotions in a fundamentally compassionate film that emphasizes gentle decencies among a diverse array of people. The film tells the story of a Turkish immigrant couple, Huseyin and Fatma: their life between Turkey and Germany, their struggles raising four children, and their ultimate success in building a close-knit family despite many obstacles. In an important scene, Fatma (Demet Gul) enters a German store intending to buy bread and milk. The camera adopts her perspective, panning up over a dizzying array of unfamiliar products—cans of corned beef, jars of cured meat in gelatin—then cutting to a medium shot of her looking toward the source of an indiscernible spoken gibberish. A reverse shot shows a German male shopkeeper speaking to Fatma, ostensibly in German. A further series of shot/reverse shots show the two trying to communicate and ultimately failing when instead of the bread she asks for, Fatma is offered an enormous roll of salami, but not before her eyes come to rest on a figurine of a pig that is situated on the counter to her right, slightly above her eyeline. A second exchange about milk proves successful, and Fatma and the shopkeeper celebrate. During the exchange, Fatma, supposedly speaking in her native Turkish, uses nativespeaker German while the German shopkeeper, supposedly speaking German, uses invented words and sounds. Anyone who speaks German will understand everything she says but will be flummoxed by the sounds coming from the shopkeeper's mouth.

The camera work and the use of German and gibberish in this scene align viewers with Fatma and alienate them from the shopkeeper. Her words are fully comprehensible to what must be the anticipated viewers of a film made in German to be released in Germany. So what does it mean that both camera and language function here to distance many presumed viewers from representations of “themselves” and to invite them to identify with the very often othered Turkish immigrant who does not speak the language of the country in which she lives? What affect might the filmmaker be aiming for?