In the first few minutes of Hysteria, a flat is on fire. The curtains fall down in blazing strips, the fire creeps across the floor and walls, eating its way through every room in seconds, taking everything in its path with it. You don’t know for sure whether someone is still asleep on the sofa in the living room or not, nor whether people are burning alive somewhere else in the flat. In reality, that was the case. Hysteria deals with the right-wing extremist arson attack in Solingen, North Rhine-Westphalia, in which five young people, including three children, died in 1993. A further 17 fire victims suffered injuries, some of them life-threatening. Solingen was the shocking low point of a whole wave of xenophobic, racist attacks on people of foreign origin in Germany in the 1990s.
While we are still looking at the screen in shock, not knowing whether this is real archive footage of the gruesome events of that time, the camera slowly pulls back, widening our view. People move into the picture, sitting in front of a small monitor on which what we saw before flickers in black and white. A little relieved, we realise that the events are being reconstructed – for a fictional shoot. Only to be perplexed again the next moment. Wait a minute – the film crew has set fire to a flat just to exploit the trauma of the victims artistically? But it gets even worse.
The fictional German-Turkish director Yigit (Serkan Kaya) sends some Muslim extras he has recruited from the local refugee centre to the burnt-out set house. They are horrified to discover that a real Koran has just been burned there – deliberately. Yigit wants to capture the extras’ reactions on camera. Some of them strongly criticise the action on set and afterwards – then the original analogue recordings suddenly disappear from Yigit’s flat and a heated argument breaks out about who stole the film reels. Everyone is under suspicion – the extras Said (Mehdi Meskar), Mustafa (Aziz Çapkurt) and Majid (Nazmi Kırık) from the refugee centre, Yigit himself and his partner Lilith (Nicolette Krebitz), who is also involved in the production, as well as the assistant director Elif (Devrim Lingnau), who is caught between the fronts and has to decide between her conscience and her career.
Hysteria – the second feature by director Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay – plays with the audience’s irritation right from the start and cleverly shows how an event like the one in Solingen is instrumentalised by various interest groups. As effortlessly as it is tricky, Hysteria switches between documentary in film, drama, thriller and satire in order to raise a clever and courageous examination of key socio-political and ethical questions by means of a twisty ‘whodunit’. Who is allowed to make films about whom? What should be shown and how? And who defines who is a victim and who is a perpetrator? The different perspectives in search of the missing footage and the motives behind it confront us with the indifference towards human lives and cultural differences. Via excellent dialogue, the film critically examines the sovereignty of interpretation on the subject of integration and identity, as well as the limits of film production.
Hysteria ends with the important note that no Korans were burned during the shooting of the film. But also – as the very last shot makes clear, which you should pay close attention to – with the principle of hope. That we are capable of learning. That attacks like the one in Solingen will not happen again. That we break down the existing social power structures. That in film, just as in real life, less emotionally charged symbolism is visible and important, but all the more so the diverse representation of Muslim life and that we generally have more courage to engage in dialogue.
by Sarah Stutte
Edited by Amber Wilkinson
©FIPRESCI 2025