As a truckload of Kurdish refugees enter the tunnel into Germany near the beginning of Yilmaz Arslan's arresting drama Fratricide, a young orphan speaks in voiceover about how this moneyed place erodes the souls of those who enter it. But that really isn't what the movie is about. While Arslan does present German urbania as a bleak place for immigrants, who are mostly forced to scrape by on ill-gotten deutschmarks, he's really more concerned with the impossibility of assimilation and the tribal battles that rage even on foreign soil. The Kurds and Turks at war in the film are refugees without refuge; unable to find legitimate footing in this land of plenty, they bring generations-old conflicts with them, and their slow-burning frustrations (and a few cruel twists of fate) lead inexorably to tragedy.
Fratricide has a strong moral center in Erdal Celik, an intense, rebellious Kurdish teenager who leaves his impoverished village for Germany after his brother Nurretin Celik sends money for his transport. But after discovering that Nurretin earned the money pimping, Erdal avoids his brother and seals himself off in a government facility for young immigrants. There he meets 11-year-old orphaned Kurd Xevat Gectan, whom he immediately takes under his wing, employing him as his assistant in a side business cutting hair in a filthy bar bathroom. Following an ugly late-night encounter on the subway with a pair of second-generation Turkish thugs, Erdal reluctantly agrees to a final meeting with Nurretin, but when they run into the thugs on the streets, everyone's lives take a dramatic turn for the worst.
Shot with such grit that the lenses seem coated with grease, Fratricide offers a myopic impression of an unnamed German city, and that's probably the point, since so much of its territory and opportunities are sealed off from these immigrant characters. For Nurretin and the Turks, who have been there for some time, the city has exacted a corrosive moral penalty, forcing them into a life of depravity and exploitation. Arslan lays it on too thick at times, especially in gratuitously violent sequences that include child rape and a pit bull gnawing on human intestines. But in a film this angry and righteous, a little heavy-handedness is an acceptable consequence.