Baba & Anne Tapes

Synopsis

Durmus K. grew up in Kreuzberg, Berlin, in the 1970s with a single burning dream: to become a professional footballer. Discovered on the schoolyard of the Hunsrück elementary school, his talent was undeniable. He played for the local club Türk-El-Spor and a career in professional football seemed within reach — until it wasn't.

His father, shaped by traditional values and a volatile temperament, shut that door. Instead of the pitch, Durmus was sent into the

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Durmus K. grew up in Kreuzberg, Berlin, in the 1970s with a single burning dream: to become a professional footballer. Discovered on the schoolyard of the Hunsrück elementary school, his talent was undeniable. He played for the local club Türk-El-Spor and a career in professional football seemed within reach — until it wasn't.

His father, shaped by traditional values and a volatile temperament, shut that door. Instead of the pitch, Durmus was sent into the metalworking industry, where he trained as a machinist and lathe operator. Football became a refuge rather than a career — the Kreuzberg street courts a place to breathe, to be free, to survive a difficult home life marked by his father's violence.

Years later, Reyhan came to Berlin from Konya, Türkiye, to marry Durmus and build a family. The daughter of a tailor, she arrived with hopes for a new life, but soon faced the cultural shock, loneliness, and disappointments of living outside her homeland. In a foreign society where belonging was never simple, Reyhan dedicated herself to raising their three children, carrying much of the emotional weight of family life while searching for her own place in Berlin.

After two decades together, Durmus and Reyhan divorced. Determined to maintain her independence, Reyhan now works several jobs to support herself and continue building a life on her own terms. Her story runs alongside Durmus's as one of sacrifice, resilience, displacement, and the quiet strength required to begin again.

Decades later, Durmus has rebuilt himself entirely. He now works in IT risk management, travels the world, and remains a devoted and passionate follower of the game — known among his friends as the "Tipp-Orakel," the prediction oracle. Divorced and the father of three, football is still the thread connecting him to his youth, his roots, and himself.

Reyhan earned the german citizenship and sees herself as part of the german society, where she can vote and participate.

Baba & Anne Tapes is a short documentary that follows Durmus through the Business-Cup tournament, using football as the entry point into a much deeper story. Told through intimate conversations, childhood photographs, and impulse interviews, the film is ultimately about the relationship between fathers, mothers, and children — missed dreams, migration, generational wounds, and the complicated love that outlasts both marriage and disappointment.

The filmmaker himself is not a neutral observer: as he explores what fatherhood meant to Durmus and what motherhood demanded of Reyhan, he is forced to reckon with his own relationship to both parents.

This is a personal film about what gets passed down, what gets taken away, and what remains.

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Background

The question of what a father owes a son — and what a son owes a father — has never been more urgent. Durmus K.'s story sits at the intersection of migration, masculinity, and generational trauma, themes that resonate deeply across Europe's multicultural cities and far beyond.

His story is not an exception. It is the rule for an entire generation of children of immigrants who watched their parents sacrifice — or destroy — their own dreams in the name of

...

The question of what a father owes a son — and what a son owes a father — has never been more urgent. Durmus K.'s story sits at the intersection of migration, masculinity, and generational trauma, themes that resonate deeply across Europe's multicultural cities and far beyond.

His story is not an exception. It is the rule for an entire generation of children of immigrants who watched their parents sacrifice — or destroy — their own dreams in the name of survival and tradition. The Boomer father who asks "What will you become?" versus the son who has learned to ask "What am I?" — this generational fracture is lived daily by millions, yet rarely given the intimate, honest cinematic treatment it deserves.

Baba Tapes speaks directly to that audience: children of immigrants in their 30s and 40s, navigating identities shaped by parents who were shaped by displacement. It is also a film for anyone who has ever loved a difficult parent anyway — which is to say, almost everyone.

Football is the universal language that makes this story immediately accessible. It opens the door. What waits inside is something rarer: a genuine "Seelenstriptease" — a soul-baring examination of how love between fathers and sons gets lost in silence, and how it might still be found.

The film's format — a 15 to 18 minute short documentary blending intimate interviews, archival childhood imagery, and observational footage — positions it perfectly for festival circulation, broadcaster acquisition, and online platform distribution.

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Style & Tone

Baba Tapes will leave its audience sitting in the particular silence that follows when something long unspoken is finally said out loud. It is the feeling of recognising your own family in someone else's story — the ache of distance between people who love each other and never quite found the words.

To achieve this, the film lives in intimacy and texture. The visual language is deep and darkish — shadows that hold weight, colours that have aged like memory

...

Baba Tapes will leave its audience sitting in the particular silence that follows when something long unspoken is finally said out loud. It is the feeling of recognising your own family in someone else's story — the ache of distance between people who love each other and never quite found the words.

To achieve this, the film lives in intimacy and texture. The visual language is deep and darkish — shadows that hold weight, colours that have aged like memory itself. Nothing is clinical or overlit.

This is a film that processes pain, and the image should feel it.

The footage moves between worlds: the present-day streets of Kreuzberg, the football pitches where Durmus once played and still plays, and the landscapes of Türkiye where the roots of this story were first planted, in particular Konya (Anatolia).

These abroad shootings are not backdrop — they are emotional geography. They ask the audience to feel the distance a family carries when it moves between cultures, between generations, between silences from 1972 on.

Archive material — photographs, home footage, images from a childhood — surfaces throughout, fragmentary and tender. These are the documents of a life that was not filmed with intention, which makes them all the more powerful when they appear.

Family interviews and audio recordings give the film its heartbeat. Voices carry what faces sometimes cannot. A son listening to his father speak. A father who may not have the language but has the feeling.

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Budget

This section includes information about this project.

Impact doc story project screenplay camera team team visual impact story. Producer producer narrative award doc editing editing team.

Our Ask

Every generation inherits something from its parents. Sometimes it is wisdom. Sometimes it is wounds. Most of the time, it is both.

Durmus K. was a boy from Kreuzberg with a gift and a dream. His father took that dream away. And yet, Durmus still loves football. He still loves his father. That paradox is at the heart of the film.

Baba & Anne Tapes is a short documentary about what happens in the spaces between parents and children when love exists, but language fails. Through Durmus's story, the film explores the wound between a father and a son: the silenced dreams, inherited expectations, and forms of masculinity that leave little room for tenderness.

But this is also Reyhan's story. She came to Berlin from Konya, Türkiye, to marry Durmus and build a family, only to find herself confronted with cultural shock, loneliness, and disappointment in a society where belonging was never guaranteed. As a mother, she dedicated her life to raising their three children, carrying the emotional and practical weight of family life while slowly trying to build an independent life of her own. Today, after divorce, she works several jobs to sustain that independence — still searching for belonging, but no longer waiting for it to be given to her.

The film is about migration, masculinity, motherhood, sacrifice, and the dreams one generation buries so the next can stand on top of them — sometimes without even knowing it. It is personal. It is specific. And because of that, it becomes universal.

We are at a cultural moment where audiences are hungry for stories that reflect the full complexity of immigrant families — not as political symbols, not as cautionary tales, but as human beings with inner lives, contradictions, disappointments, endurance, and love that does not always know how to show itself.

Baba & Anne Tapes is that story: a film about what gets passed down, what gets taken away, and what remains between a father, a mother, and their children.

What we need is simple: the support to tell it properly.

We are seeking funding and partnerships to cover production costs including the abroad shoot in Türkiye, archive licensing, post-production, sound design and score. We are also actively looking for festival partners, broadcasters, and platforms who believe that the children of immigrants deserve to see their fathers on screen — complicated, real, and worthy of a film.

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Baba & Anne Tapes

Logline

Participants

Sanne Schimanski

Durmus Kücük

Reyhan Tikan

Team

Mehmet Küçük

Sanne Schimanski

Budget

Stills

Our Ask