Navina Sundaram: The Fifth Wall

Ausländertest
Navina Sundaram, FRG 1982, 6 min.

Binationale Ehen
Navina Sundaram, FRG 1982, 12 min.

Asyl in der BRD
Navina Sundaram, FRG 1982, 10 min.

Zweierlei Asylrecht
Navina Sundaram, FRG 1979, 10 min.

Der Fall Kemal Altun
Navina Sundaram, FRG 1983, 9 min.

Introduced by Merle Kröger and Mareike Bernien

A seminal cycle of work by journalist and filmmaker Navina Sundaram,which critically dissects the realities of migration, racism, and asylum policy in the Federal Republic of Germany during the late 1970s and early 1980s. United by a clear-eyed, investigative approach, the films move from institutional analysis to intimate personal stories, painting a comprehensive portrait of a society grappling with integration and exclusion.

Zweierlei Asylrecht establishes the central theme of a discriminatory "two-tier" asylum system. It contrasts the state-managed welcome for politically convenient Vietnamese "boat people" with the neglect faced by Kurdish refugees, sarcastically highlighting the figure of the "lovely anti-communist asylum seeker." This examination of systemic bias continues in Asyl in der BRD which exposes daily bureaucratic discrimination at Hamburg's Foreigners' Office. In a more satirical key, Ausländertest observes a university experiment challenging the notion that xenophobia is biologically innate and directly confronting mainstream perceptions of racism.

Sundaram shifts focus to the profound personal consequences of these policies and societal attitudes. Binationale Ehen portrays the struggles of German women and their foreign husbands, for whom anonymous threats and open insults became a part of family life, framed as a betrayal of an imagined national community. The most tragic outcome is documented in Der Fall Kemal Altun, a film which traces the case of a Turkish student who, caught between a granted asylum plea and an ongoing extradition lawsuit by the state, jumped to his death during a court hearing—a devastating indictment of a system's failure.

Collectively, these films form a powerful and urgent chronicle. They move from the mechanics of law and bureaucracy to the human cost they inflict, culminating in a plea, as stated in Zweierlei Asylrecht, for Article 16 of the Basic Law—”Politically persecuted persons have the right of asylum”—to apply equally to all. (Bethan Hughes)

Merle Kröger is a novelist and film author living in Berlin. As curator of the transnational cultural project “Import Export. Cultural Transfer between India and Germany, Austria” (2005), she began a long-term collaboration with Navina Sundaram.