German director depicts Muslims’ struggles with challenges to faith in Berlin festival film

Berlin film follows Muslims struggling with crises

BERLIN — A first-time German director’s film about Muslims struggling to come to terms with unwanted pregnancy, homosexuality and other challenges to their beliefs debuted Wednesday at the Berlin film festival.

“Shahada,” or “Faith,” is one of 20 movies in the festival’s main competition. The first feature film from Burhan Qurbani, a 29-year-old German Muslim, it is competing alongside offerings from more established figures including Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer.”

Qurbani said the movie is meant as “a call to dialogue.”

Set in Berlin, it has three interlinked episodes — following the daughter of an imam who turns radical following an illegal abortion; a young Nigerian who struggles, in the end successfully, to reconcile his faith with feelings for another man; and a policeman racked by guilt over an accident in which he shot a woman.

“I wanted to show in my film that Muslims and Islam are not only one face, Arabic, (with a) beard, but it’s really colorful,” the director said of the variety of characters in his film.

The liberal imam of the movie, who preaches that the Quran is a book of love and is keen to reconcile with his daughter, is “designed as an ideal,” Qurbani said. “He’s what I would like to have as an imam in my ideal mosque.”

He seeks reconciliation with his daughter, who starts out as a very Westernized young woman but “moves into total radicalism out of a feeling of isolation, out of a feeling of not being seen and accepted,” said Maryam Zaree, who plays her.

Qurbani said his aim was to explore “stories that take our figures to the extreme limit of what is bearable for them.”

The Berlin festival’s top Golden Bear prize and other winners will be announced Saturday.