Berlinale 2025 | Hysteria 

Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay returns to Berlinale with the World Premiere of Hysteria, he previously attended the festival with Oray, which won the Best First Feature Award in 2019. In both films, Büyükatalay explores themes of Muslim culture in Germany. Hysteria centers on the making of a film about an arson attack on German migrant residents in the 90s, however, during the production, the film-within-the-film’s director, Yigit (played by Serkan Kaya), uses migrants from a local refugee center as extras for a scene who discover that he burned a Quran for the film, leading to fiery tensions and conflict.

The opening scene does a lot of work as Büyükatalay does a good job showing the disconnect between the experience happening on set and that behind the monitors. Some lines in Act One elucidate the film’s theme, particularly when one of the extras, Mustafa, explains why he doesn’t like Yigit or filmmakers like him. He’s talking to Elif (played by Devrim Lingnau), and he says directors like Yigit “make films so they can have a clean conscience,” that people that look like him and Said (played by Mehdi Meskar) can only “play a victim or a terrorist.” He gets to the meat of the burning of the Quran; Mustafa himself isn’t religious but he recognizes that burning the Quran was meant to illicit a reaction. If you go back to that opening scene, when Yigit is speaking to these extras, who are refugees, he tells them not to act but react as if it was the real house after the incident and not a set, illustrating this is how he operates. Mustafa posits that filmmakers make a choice, “do [they] want to share something, or sell something?”

This is a film about who has the power to control narratives, and it plays that out repeatedly as the tensions boil in the aftermath of the filming when the tapes disappear. But the film also asks you to look into who gets to tell stories and what stories they choose to tell. Yigit, and most of the crew, like Elif, believe he’s making an important film. However, it looks at a specific act of violence that most Western audiences could watch and feel bad/sad about, but brush off as a thing of the past and not reflect on what is currently happening. Büyükatalay’s film is much more interesting than the film that Yigit was trying to make because within it we get a hint of perspective from all these characters as the conspiracy behind the missing tapes unfolds and blame is shifted.

Ignorance and a lack of curiosity in the subjects some filmmakers center their films on is also something the film touches upon. Yigit seems to have genuinely not realized burning the Quran was going to be problematic. So, you have to look back at his initial choice as being one done in pure ignorance, he was thinking of the characters and what they would have in their house when it got burned, and did his set accordingly, not considering what it would mean. Now, my read on Yigit as a filmmaker is that if he had known, he would have still done it because he wanted a reaction, it was why he hired extras that he believed could relate to the experience. This is tied to him being a filmmaker who wants to sell rather than share something. Someone truly connected to wanting to share the story and push for change would not just try to recreate the events to create an emotional reaction, they would try to get the audience to engage to make a change today. He would not need tricks like seeking people he believed could give a “real” reaction due to his belief of their shared trauma/experiences with the victims, but found a way to tie the themes of the film with current events in Germany (like Büyükatalay does in Hysteria). And he wouldn’t have needed to burn a Quran, and if he felt that it was important enough to see in the scene, he would have done a fake prop one.

Hysteria had its World Premiere at the 75th annual Berlin International Film Festival in the Panorama section.