Papa

The calm lasts for just a moment. Then the little one, half-asleep, hits his head. The baby joins in his loud crying, and in the morning, dad’s searching arm reaches out on the sleep sofa, but it is empty. His girlfriend, the mother of the two boys, is gone. She has left behind a few words on a note in the kitchen; she is not reachable by phone. Dad is what one would call in colloquial terms a “Häferl”: he gets hot quickly and boils over—like the milk that he now has to heat up for his baby. Dad is a young man with an attitude, a rapper, a macho. The way he sees and expresses himself are not so easy to align with the care and needs of small children. Apart from that, he lives in Vienna where the care of small children is quite generally still mainly a family and women’s matter. From this starting situation, Umut Dag develops in just forty minutes a compact, little story that seems nearly like a documentary in many situations with its proximity to father and children. A nimble camera follows the anonymous main character played very convincingly by Murathan “Aqil” Muslu in his hectic movements between room, home studio, and kitchen. The children must be fed, diapered, occupied, and calmed. Then friends come by and the family father has to decide between new responsibilities and his cherished old habits. There are no painless, easy answers to the question of how (or whether) it is possible to conform to a community, its values and codes, and at the same time, be a good father. But for the cinema one can gain from its translation into a harmoniously empathetic, tragicomic behavioral study. (Isabella Reicher) Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt