GERMANY: Danish film, which examines tensions with Muslim immigrants, screened in Berlin amidst controversy over the Danish cartoons depicting Prophet Mohammad.

Record ID: 783458

  • Title: GERMANY: Danish film, which examines tensions with Muslim immigrants, screened in Berlin amidst controversy over the Danish cartoons depicting Prophet Mohammad.
  • Date: 24th February 2006
  • Summary: OLESEN AND ALI-BAKIER LEAVING PODIUM OLESEN SPEAKING TO REPORTER VARIOUS OF ALI-BAKIER
  • Embargoed: 11th March 2006 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Germany
  • Country: Germany
  • Topics: Religion
  • Reuters ID: LVA8EXZ5D100XJ750LW5WZ0ZJWPT
  • Story Text: For the director of a new film exploring the tensions between Danes and Muslim immigrants, the row over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad first published in Denmark should not have come as a complete surprise.
    Annette Olesen's "1:1" was conceived long before the caricatures, which have angered Muslims who view any portrayal of the Prophet as blasphemous, appeared in a Danish publication before being repeated in several other European countries.
    But the 40-year-old from Copenhagen, who brought her film to the Berlin Film Festival, saw clear links.
    "Watching the film again last night ... was very strange, because I think there is a parallel feeling between my little film, and these characters, and the crisis," she told Reuters in an interview late on
    Monday (February 13).
    "I think something happened to the Western world and America after 9/11 ... and there's a certain loss of innocence. We were very interested in seeing how that affected people in the street and how that has affected small communities."
    The low-budget film, which Olesen says is principally about fear, is set on a Danish housing estate where 16-year-old Mie and her boyfriend Shadi are a model of interracial integration, uniting Danish and Palestinian families respectively.
    But tensions between and within the communities grow when Mie's brother Per is badly beaten and falls into a coma.
    Some of Mie's friends, along with the police, assume the attackers are immigrants, and Shadi has reason to suspect that the perpetrator was in fact his Muslim brother.
    Olesen said her film, and the worldwide protests that have erupted over the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, had been a long time in coming.
    "I think the consequences of what the (Prophet) Mohammad drawings have caused is just a symptom. It's much more complex, at least in Denmark and also in the world. I think the response to the drawings of the Prophet is much more complex than just the drawings," she said.
    The director said the drawings were the "last straw" for some Muslims.
    Danes have found themselves the target of protests across the world, with Danish diplomatic missions set on fire and commercial goods boycotted in some Muslim countries.
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