Set in Essen, the town where director Thomas Arslan grew up, Turn the Music Down, his debut feature from 1994, is a documentary-style tale of a group of teenagers approaching their exams and contemplating, without much enthusiasm, their possible futures. ‘Rite of passage’ is hardly the term for their passive and ennui-ridden attitude to where their lives are going, but as the film progresses, its mainly unprofessional cast emerge as real individuals whose progress we follow with increasing interest and sympathy. —Sheila Seacroft
Thomas Arslan was born in Braunschweig on July 16, 1962. From 1963 to 1967 he lived in Essen, and from 1967 to 1971 in Ankara, Turkey, where he attended primary school. In 1971 he returned to Essen, completing high school there in 1982. He completed his community service in Hamburg in 1984, spending 1985/86 in Munich where he studied German language and literature and history for two terms. He studied at the film school dffb in Berlin from 1986-92, and has been a screenwriter and filmmaker ever since. He took part in the Panorama section of the Berlinale in 1994 with Mach die Musik leiser; his documentary Aus der Ferne was shown in the Forum in 2006. Since 2007, he has been a professor of narrative film at the Berlin University of Arts. —filmportal.de