The Turkish community of 2.5 million in Germany is a dress rehearsal for Turkey joining the EU, writes Derek Scally in Berlin.
An elderly Turkish man weeps as he burns photographs of Sibel, the daughter he believes has ruined his family's honour and who, for him, no longer exists.
The scene is from Head On, a daring film about Germany's Turkish community which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in February and took the top prize at the European Film Awards this week.
Critics who attacked it as a clichéd portrayal of Turkish immigrants thought twice when, days after the première, a German tabloid newspaper revealed that the actor who played Sibel once performed in porn films. Her father, like her on-screen father, disowned her.
Head On is heavy going: a dynamic but depressing take on the inter-generational conflict between parents and children in Germany's 2.5 million Turkish community.
The film shows the parents who arrived in Germany in the 1960s in the huge migration wave of "Gastarbeiter", guest workers. They retain their Turkish values with pride and even a growing defiance as they slowly realise they are no longer "guests" in Germany and can never go back.
While many of them speak poor German, their German-born children's Turkish is as bad, if not worse. The second and third generation immigrants feel socially and culturally homeless in German society, but just as alien when visiting Turkey. They rebel against the strict value system of their parents, yet often feel honour-bound to defend these same values from outside criticism.
In short, Head On is just the kind of warts-and-all portrayal of Turkish life that its prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, doesn't want right now.
On Thursday, EU government leaders agreed to commence accession negotiations with Turkey. But Turkey is already long in the EU, at least for people in German cities such as Berlin with its huge Turkish neighbourhoods of Kreuzberg and Neukölln. Germany is the dress rehearsal.
Despite 40 years of co-existing, Germans' clichés about Turks, positive and negative, are widespread because they are so easily confirmed. When German journalists drop into Kreuzberg for an afternoon to write a feature, they find lots of clichéd colour: Ali in the kebab shop, Mustapha selling fruit and vegetables and the twice-weekly market where squat Turkish mothers buy roasted sunflower seeds and watermelon.
Ask anyone at the market what they think of Turkey joining the EU and you get blank stares. A butcher has hung up a sign on his stall reading "Please no photographs" because, he says, he is sick of having his picture taken without his permission and used to illustrate the same clichéd articles.
The market and the kebab shops are one side of Turkish life here: the first generation of immigrants and their children who had few prospects in rural Turkey and moved to Germany four decades ago. Neither they nor Germans expected them to stay, integration efforts were nil and, not surprisingly, Turkish ghettos grew up.
TO IRISH EYES, the so-called ghettos of Turkish bakeries, butchers' shops and travel agencies bear an uncanny resemblance to the Irish ghettos of Sunnyside and Woodside in New York. But in Germany, Turkish ghettos are seen as evidence of a dangerous failure of integration and a breeding ground for extremism.
Hard-line conservatives, who oppose Turkey joining the EU, still view the older Turks as unwelcome guests, 40 years on, and their offspring as potential Muslim extremists who should be deported.
Green Party left-wingers have attacked what they call the conservatives' "crusade" against the Turkish community. Conservatives, on the other hand, attack Greens' well-intentioned but ultimately misplaced tolerance of wanting to see only the best of Turkish culture and airbrushing out the rest.
"The Greens campaign to stop female circumcision in Iran, yet I can tell you of two doctors 10 minutes from here who will do the same job, no questions asked," says Gisela Mauer, a teacher and former social worker in Neukölln, where one in three residents is Turkish.
If the status quo is a problem, both sides are at fault - yet both sides blame each other for "Parallel Societies", a new buzzword for ghettos.
"Of course there are ghettos, what do you expect?" says Sezgin Yildirim, a young Kreuzberg shop-owner who moved here in 1991. "When Turks arrived 40 years ago people checked their teeth and lungs to see if they were healthy and put them in foreigner hostels. But nobody saw the need to teach them German or treat them like real people."
The gap between the Germans and the Turks can be seen in how Turkey's EU ambitions took the Germans by surprise and has become a big issue here, as elsewhere in Europe, only in the last 18 months.
Since the murder of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, however, the accession debate has become entwined in the long-running integration debate, bringing to the surface long-simmering anger of Germans who feel, like the many Dutch, that their tolerance has bred intolerance among Muslims.
DER SPIEGEL MAGAZINE published a horrific 17-page report on Muslim women in Germany, of whom three-quarters are Turkish. The report covered the full palette of intolerance: husbands beating and raping their wives, keeping them virtual prisoners in their own homes and preventing them learning German; brothers murdering their sisters in "honour" killings; and the brisk trade in young brides between Turkey and Germany to fuel the arranged marriage market.
Such reports horrify but also anger Senay Cilek (34), a Turkish woman who runs a chain of successful gourmet food stores in Berlin.
"This is very serious but it is just a small minority of people, a small part of the Turkish community blown up out of all proportion," says Cilek. She has become a poster girl in the German media for Erdogan's modern, tolerant Turkey, a role she is uneasy about.
"In my heart, though, I am divided about Turkey in the EU," she says.
She feels the country now has a real perspective and that even in smaller cities and villages, women can now live their own lives, study and escape their families if necessary. "But the EU will be terrible for the poorer people, they will be left even poorer and will be left behind," says Cilek.
Many young people in the Turkish community here share her mixed feelings about the opportunities of accession. Many say that, as EU countries debate Turkey's accession and put it to referendum, another bitter debate will begin in Turkey.
"The EU will be good for businessmen, but now Erdogan's problems will start at home," says Sezgin Yildirim in his Kreuzberg shop. "When people start to realise how they will have to change and what they will have to give up, they will start to ask 'why?' and resist."