A young teenage girl suddenly confesses to Islam – that turns out to be quite a shock for the parents.
Berlin – The parents in this film don’t have it particularly easy with their rebellious daughter Nina anyway. It gets really complicated when the 16-year-old girl suddenly converted to Islam online and shows up veiled.
This very special story is told by the social comedy “How did we deserve this” this Friday at 8:15 pm on Arte.
Nina (Chantal Zitzenbacher) is suddenly called Fatima, from now on walks around with a veil, prays regularly in Mecca, eats halal and has completely renounced alcohol and drug consumption and wild parties. Her left-liberal – and now quite disconcerted – mother Wanda (Caroline Peters) is particularly surprised by this.
Her divorced husband and Nina’s father Harald (Simon Schwarz) and her current boyfriend Tom (Marcel Mohab) are less – they both prove to be extremely conflict-averse and are of no help to the staunch feminist Wanda.
Even a jointly produced “This is not how we raised you” does not change anything: Fatima wants to perform an act of solidarity towards a classmate and “no longer be a remote-controlled victim of capitalism”.
Writer Eva Spreitzhofer (54, “Fast Determined”) makes her directorial debut here and presents a snappy, pointed and subtle comedy with cheeky dialogues (“Couldn’t you just become Catholic?”) On the subject of acceptance, equality and freedom of religion. She proves excellent timing and delivers wonderful verbal battles as well as the reversal of common puberty clichés.
The daughter is more mature and more realistic than her parents, who in fact have to ask themselves whether they deserve all of this, and rightly so. By the way, the picture-perfect model of a blended family gets a lot of fat, various views and sensitivities clash violently, and many life plans are questioned – rarely in a silly, but mostly in a funny way.
There is no question about the great acting achievements in this film. Above all, Chantal Zitzenbacher (26, “The last party of your life”), as a violently pubescent daughter, shows in a refreshingly clear way how quickly and radically the allegedly progressive values of her educated, bourgeois model parents can be questioned.
And Caroline Peters (49, “Murder with a View”) paints the picture of an increasingly overwhelmed mother, whose atheistic and ecologically correct worldview crumbles like a house of cards. In other words: the veil is lifted. dpa
