Elaha

Director: Milena Aboyan (Germany). Year of Release: 2023

A Kurdish wedding party. A young man and woman are dancing vigorously, surrounded by a circle of wedding guests. Their dance is interrupted by a young girl who taps the young woman and take her to the table where her family is sitting. Her mother chastises her for drawing attention to herself,, when it’s not even her wedding. She’ll have enough time for that when she gets married herself in 9 weeks’ time.

Elaha storms of to the ladies’ toilets, where her friends are already occupying a cubicle, smoking. This is one of the few spaces where women are allowed time with each other. They gossip about the bride and ridicule her effrontery in wearing a red ribbon symbolising chastity, when everyone knows she’s already pregnant. They swap stories of their own sexual infidelities, though when Elaha is asked if she’s “you know, done it”, she doesn’t answer.

Elaha is 22, but looks much younger. She is attending one of those job seekers’ courses where a frustrated teacher tries to excite restless young adults about interview technique, so that they can move on to a job, or maybe repeat their Abitur (the German equivalent of “A” levels). Elaha also has a mini-job in an industrial laundrette, working for the sister of her fiancé Nasim. Every so often, Nasim visits the laundrette and expects her to wash his towels.

At home Elaha shares a room with her younger sister, which somewhat limits the time and space she has for herself. Her brother suffers from some sort of learning disability, to which she reacts with lots of love and attention. The kids speak German with each other and a mixture of German and Kurdish with their parents. The parents are loving but strict, which means that Elaha must ask friends to provide alibis or Nasim to sweet talk them when she wants to go out in the evening.

In the limited time which Elaha is able to be on her own, she watches videos of medical operations to replace a hymen. One day, she skips work and visits a medical practise which offers such operations. Yes, they could do it, but the operation costs thousands of Euros, and she would need someone earning more than her €450 per month to guarantee that the bills would be paid. Needless to say, Elaha neither knows anyone that rich, nor feels able to confide in anyone.

Further Internet research finds a package which can be bought in any chemists’ Elaha buys two packets, but her trial run shows that these medicines are unreliable. She turns to her teacher, Stella, who as a single pregnant Black woman has some sort of understanding what it is like to be on the edges of society. Stella is inspirational, asking Elaha if she really is the woman she wants to be. But it takes her some work to persuade her pupil that she has her best interests at heart.

It was perhaps inevitable that some critics entirely missed the film’s message of confronting the marginalisation of women in all societies. Some reviews concentrated on the specific sexist nature of Kurdish people, or even of “Muslim and other patriarchal communities”. All this despite the scene where one of Eleha’s friends says “I wish we had German vaginas”, and gets the answer “it doesn’t matter if we have Bosnian, Swedish, or German vaginas. We still live in the patriarchy”.

Even here, the film avoids any simplistic interpretation of “the patriarchy” as something which is merely sustained by evil men acting in their own apparent self-interest. Yes, Nasim is at his most objectionable when he tells Elaha: “I’ll give you all freedoms., as long as you listen to me”. His tone is both loving and threatening. He will allow his bride-to-be to be free, but only if she agrees to behave in a way which is entirely acceptable to him.

But it is the women in the film who contribute most towards restricting Elaha’s freedom of choice. It is Nasim’s mother who insists that she visit a doctor for a virginity test before the marriage- It is Elaha’s own mother who tells her that she would rather have a dead child than one who had had sex before marriage. Patriarchy is seen as a thing which is real, but which is maintained by the acquiescence of both male and female members of society, particularly those with power.

The attitude of seeing women’s oppression as a specifically Muslim or Kurdish problem also misses the way in which the film shows the specificity of Elaha’s experience. As a woman from a doubly oppressed community (Kurds are oppressed by Turkey at home and Germany abroad), Elaha is more prone than a German woman to cling to the traditions of her community. Kurdish rituals are part of Elaha’s self-understanding in the way that the Oktoberfest does not characterise Bavarians.

In this way, Elaha, the film, is much more nuanced than the one which some critics think they saw – one about evil men, and specifically about evil Muslim men. Instead it shows the social roots of sexism, and the tragic effects that this sort of oppression has on its female victims. Elaha starts the film as a free spirit, who just wants to dance and have fun. She ends it as a suicidal wreck who is expected to feel guilty for her inability to reach society’s unrealistic expectations of her.

In one scene, Elaha says “I am not a product which can be tested”. And yet, unlike her friend Yusuf – who has cut himself off from society, and apparently has no other friends but Elaha, she has an intractable bond with her family and her community. The film is a tragedy whose main character is allowed so little agency that any decision which she takes is going to end in her downfall. It is a film of defeat, but with such good-natured characters that we are allowed some film on the way.