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Elaha

Elaha

Movie · 2023 · 15 people

Milena Aboyan directed Elaha, her first feature film and a German drama, from a screenplay she wrote together with Constantin Hatz. It was made by the production company Kinescope Film in German, and follows a young Kurdish-German woman caught between cultural expectations and her own freedom. The film held its world premiere in February 2023 at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival, in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino section, and later received German Film Award nominations, among them best feature film.

At its centre is Elaha, who is twenty-two. With her marriage approaching, she is convinced that she must regain her supposed innocence first. She knows a surgeon could rebuild her hymen but cannot pay for the operation, and in her search for an alternative she comes across a capsule filled with artificial blood. Around the same time she starts asking herself why she has to be a virgin and for whom. After a series of serious setbacks, she decides to pursue a sexuality that she defines for herself as a woman.

Bayan Layla plays the title role. Derya Durmaz appears as the mother, Nazmi Kırık as the father and Armin Wahedi as Nasim.

DirectorMilena Aboyan
Production companyKinescope Film

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Nazmi Kırık Nazmi Kırık Actor · born 1976 Bayan Layla Armin Wahedi Yeganeh Derya Durmaz Derya Dilber Cansu Leyan Beritan Balcı Slavko Popadic Réber Ibrahim Homa Faghiri Hadnet Tesfai Yasmin Mowafek Onur Poyraz Adnan Jafar Mehmet Daloglu

Through different eyes

Cinephile Looks at script, editing and directing choices; keeps a distance from formula films.

In her first feature, Milena Aboyan turns a difficult subject into neither a cheap scandal nor a sermon; opening in Berlin's Perspektive Deutsches Kino section and earning a German Film Award nomination for best feature suggest the balance landed. The story's engine is a very concrete goal: to recover a supposed innocence before the wedding. The smartest move in the script is how it turns that practical search, step by step, into an inner interrogation, shifting the question from 'how' to 'for whom'. The weak spot, in my view, is the way the serious setbacks that change her are lined up one after another: at times the structure feels over-planned, built to prove its thesis.

History & Society Lens Asks about the period, the social background and what the work reflects.

The film looks at a young Kurdish-German woman caught between two worlds through something as intimate as the expectation of virginity. Generational tension in migrant families is a familiar subject; what stands out here is that the issue is not reduced to a culture-clash cliché but asked as a question about a woman's say over her own body. Elaha's question of 'for whom' shows that the expectation comes not only from her family but from a quietly accepted social consensus. It is a debate hardly foreign to viewers in Turkey, and the film opens it up again in the context of migrant life in Europe.

Family Viewer Asks whether the whole household can watch it; cares about humour and heart.

This is not a film to sit down and watch with the family. Its subject is virginity, hymen surgery and female sexuality, and it deals with them openly. Parents thinking of watching it with teenagers should see it first and decide for themselves. For adults, it is a serious drama about things families find hard to talk about.

These are not reader reviews: they are short editorial takes written from different viewer perspectives with AI assistance. Reader reviews are below.

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