Trouble in Paradise

Researching his new film -- which has the working title "Rubbish in the Garden of Eden" -- Hamburg-based film director Fatih Akin decided to call up the Turkish Environment Minister Osman Pepe in Ankara.

The response was less than warm. "You might know about making films, but you don't know anything about environmental issues," the minister said.

Akin might just prove him wrong, and is currently making a docu-thriller which charts the war against a planned landfill site being waged by the 3,500 inhabitants of Camburnu, a village in the tea-growing region near the Turkish Black Sea coast.

He soon realized he couldn't expect much help from the authorities. "This chapter has long been closed," Pepe told him.

A personal project

Akin was not allowed to film the run-in with the environment minister, but the first shots from the Black Sea coast are already in the can.

"If we can step up enough pressure for the project to be halted, there could be a happy ending," the 33-year old director said in an interview with Deutsche-Presse Agentur dpa in Istanbul, "But it could also end in tragedy, with the death of the village."

The Turkish-German film director feels personally involved in the villagers' resistance.

"It's my grandfather's village. I've been fighting together with its inhabitants for the past two years," said Akin.

Foreign pressure

With so much at stake, he is pulling out all the stops both in Turkey and in Germany.

According to the Hurriyet newspaper, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan allegedly asked his environment minister "What's all this about, Osman?" when he received a letter from German Green Party leader Claudia Roth, pointing to the environmental risks of the planned landfill site.

"I think the only chance the village still has is political pressure from abroad," Akin says, stressing that Turkey has to understand the full implications. "There's no place for it in the European Union if it can't sort out its environmental problems," he says.

Making movies the Moore way

Does this mean that Akin, who won the Golden Bear at the 2004 Berlin Film Festival for his hard-hitting drama "Gegen die Wand" (Head-On), has suddenly discovered politics?

"The times are too irritating, too disturbing at the moment for me to be able to ignore it in my art," the director says. "I'm not interested in anything else right now."

He also believes in trying to combine political education and entertainment -- although he's aware of the risks, and knows a film should never seem didactic.

"First of all I want to entertain," he says. "That's my job, I'm a storyteller."

So he's unlikely to be following in the footsteps of Michael Moore, who won the Palme d'Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival for "Fahrenheit 9/11."

"It's my questions and my voice that you can hear (in the film), and sometimes I'm in the picture too," Akin says. That's where the similarities end. He has no intention of going as far as Moore does with his political message, and says he prefers to work more with the means of the classic documentary.

"I try to find images that a 12-year old could understand," Akin says.

Valuable lessons

The heroes of his film are the villagers, tea pickers, a primary school teacher, the village photographer.

"I've learn from the modest dignity of these people," he explains. "They live in fear that the garbage heap near their village will poison their water, attract pests and bring disease."

He has particular respect for Camburno Mayor Huseyin Alioglu. After the village community's court appeals against the landfill site repeatedly failed, Alioglu has been charged "for acting in an un-Turkish way, against the national interest."

"He is without doubt the tragic hero of the film," says Akin.