Ekmek Parasi – Money for Bread

The vegetables come from the garden behind the house, the fish comes out of a can, and money for bread is earned at the factory. It’s because of this money that they came here. Women from Turkey stand side-by-side with women form Mecklenburg at the conveyor belt of a fish-processing factory in Lübeck. Their hands are stained brown, the pungent smell of fish clings to them, and their arms and backs ache. If these jobs were done by men, machines would have been invented long ago to replace them. But female labour is cheap and the women do not complain. They have learned to work - and therein lies the source of their pride.

Serap Berrakkarasu, born 1962 in Istanbul, made her first short in 1989 for LAG Film, Hamburg. Her portrait of various generations of Turkish immigrants to Germany, Daughters of Two Worlds (1991), was shown in the 2019 Retrospective of the Berlinale. Ekmek parasi won the Documentary Film Prize at the 1994 Nordische Filmtage. Berrakkarasu lives in Lübeck, where she works with the church’s Youth Migration Services (JMD).