When one watches a movie titled Hysteria you’d assume catastrophe from the very instance it starts. Instead, in Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay’s film of that name, which debuted at the Berlin International Film Festival on 15 February this year, we get a gradual descent into frenzy. It reflects our reactions in reality, bursts of anger that boil down and erupt again. Büyükatalay cites the reason, “We as a society can’t talk anymore with each other”, as a key inspiration for the film, stating that we live in the times of “social hysteria".

Hysteria encompasses the madness of humanity in three central aspects of life—language, identity and environment. But the director’s key idea came from a single image: you lose your keys and someone calls you to tell you they’ve found them; you give them your address, but he never comes. “Suddenly, it’s a foreigner you’ve never met,” Büyükatalay describes, “this image of the foreigner, of the ‘other’ changes the atmosphere in the house.”

Being of Turkish immigrant background and born in Germany, Büyükatalay emphasises the feeling of alienation, particularly in the film’s main protagonist Elif (Devrim Lingnau) who is a second generation Turkish German. Yet, despite her split identity, she conforms to the ‘German’ aspect of herself, distancing herself from the Arab extras Said (Mehdi Meskar), Mustafa (Aziz Çapkurt) and the driver Majid (Nazmi Kirik). All the characters, painfully realistic down to the finest details, come from a place in Büyükatalay’s personal life, of seeing his culture being depicted on screen.

“As a Muslim filmmaker and Muslim immigrant, I was always confronted with images of Muslim people and it was, for me, completely the opposite of my life…” he explains, further adding that he felt powerless against these depictions.

“Images are always stronger than real life,” he highlights. Also having written Hysteria, Büyükatalay shares that it took five years to develop the movie, whilst writing and producing a documentary (Ask, Mark ve Ölüm (2022)) in between. He highlights the importance of representation, told through the representative. We need to represent all sides of them—not just the negative, not just the positive, not just their struggles—but as actual people. “If you control the image of people, after a while, you can control the people.”

Not only is it a personal movie for Büyükatalay, but it is also, as he calls, “a political decision” as most stories often are. A film within the film, Yigit (Serkan Kaya), the director in Hysteria, bases his story on a racist attack in Germany in the 1990s where white supremacists sets a house occupied by a Turkish family on fire, leaving them dead. Hysteria starts to set in characters when a Quran is burned on set—a trigger for each, Büyükatalay reveals. While for one it means freedom of speech and art, for another it’s post-colonial arrogance or merely cancel culture. Because of this symbol, various languages become intertwined: German, English, Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish and other Arabic dialects. Language is used to shift through the different worlds, to which Büyükatalay mentions to be inspired by the neighborhood he grew up in.“Like Elif, I can also travel fluently throughout the film world, the world of refugees and the world of muslims,” he divulges. The casting process involved hiring actors that could switch languages seamlessly, with “the freedom to speak as they feel.”

But the crux of Hysteria and Büyükatalay’s favourite scene to shoot lies inside the element of fire, particularly the burning of the house done on the first day of filming. Here, the claustrophobia is broken by a blaze, the house built and burned twice. “You know, you have all the images in your head and suddenly people come together, [to] build a house and set it on fire”, Büyükatalay says with a smile, “and it was like euphoria for me.”

He recalls that at one point, the German firefighter on site asked to stop filming, as attempts to extinguish the flames failed due to the key of the truck being broken because of the cold. “They had to call other firefighters and they c[a]me and crashed into our cars…I had to feel like, okay, this is the starting of a movie named Hysteria. I had a feeling it was gonna be a good movie.”

Rather than wanting to give a direct message to audiences, he wants to send hope. The movie builds up to the climax in the final scene, where frenzy overcomes everybody, engulfing their emotions and their environment whole.

“I realised that hysteria is when everyone is right, but everyone thinks ‘I am the only one that’s right.” The hope comes for shifting cultural narratives, acceptance of ‘the other’ in film now, and for diminishing the alienation of different, non-Western people and stories “so it doesn’t come to the ‘no turning point.’”