SamYotix

Their parents came to Germany as guest workers - and stayed. They opened Kebab stands and shops, had cars and families. Of course, many "guest workers" didn't want to go back to Turkey. They stayed.

Their children grew up in Germany - speaking Turkish at home, with their friends, stuck outside "normal" society. This film examines a small part of the german-turkish counterculture, the part most suitable to a feature film: Its dirty, heroin-abusing, violent underside, the steet "kanaksters" (kanak gangsters).

Ertan (Luk Piyes), the main character, is a charming (if brutal) small-time criminal: Heroin dealer, grocery robber, not-quite pimp. The film is told in a series of interlinked vignettes, structured as if they were memories or stories told by Ertan, conveniently in chronological order. Kanak Attack has a fast pace, uses various editing trick to good effect and shows a form of counterculture that few people ever experience from the inside - unless they are from the german-turkish working-class ghettos.

Doppelpack was one of the more pleasant surprises in german cinemas recently: Most german films nowadays have plots that attempt (but frequently fail) to be funny, like most of Til Schweiger's oeuvre.

Doppelpack, refreshingly, does not pretend to have more plot than "two buddies go out drinking together, go to a boring family party, meet two girls and go to a punk concert". Still, the film captures the attitude of the two nice "losers": They've withdrawn from the hectic mobile-phone-world of modern Germany into their own underworld, boozing in a park, trying to meet girls ("You know what our problem is? The sort of girl we'd like to meet doesn't often take a stroll round the park with a bottle opener in her handbag"), listening to old-fashioned music (with electric guitars in it)... A great film if you get the joke, which is that a lot can happen even if, on the surface, very little actually does happen. For film lovers.