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Leyla en Mecnun in den vreemde

Documentary, 2008, 61 min.

The love between her parents was like Leyla and Mecnun's. This is one of the first things Zeynep Özkaya hears on the cassette tapes she finds in her mother's house in Turkey. They are the sung love letters her parents sent back and forth between Turkey and the Netherlands in the seventies. Leyla and Mecnun can be described as the Romeo and Juliet of Arabic culture. For centuries, the story of their impossible love symbolises unbridled and doomed passion in the Eastern world. The comparison does not tally with the image Özkaya has of her parents, who meanwhile got divorced. So she takes up the camera for this intimate reconstruction of the passionate relationship between the two - a love, it soon turns out, that was dazzling and devastating. Illustrated by pictures of the family in the Turkish mountain village and their apartment in the Amsterdam Bijlmer, their parents separately tell their stories - mother impassioned and candid, father sober and at times blunt.

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