Director's Notes
One of the main purposes for me in making “Saturn Returns” was to investigate contemporary multi-culturalism in a central western city, and to use the relations between the people portrayed in the film in order to ask whether what we conceive of as “inter-cultural” only disguises what has already become one global social-class system. Is there only one culture, one system, or are there still multiple cultures?
If this centralized system of multi-culturism exists, it would naturally assist maintaining a political economic status quo in the guise of multi-culturalism. However, other groups or individuals, that we would first imagine were only victims of this system, can use it too, as a tool. For example, immigrants trumpeting traditional values and reactionary ideals in order to better assimilate in their new environment or in order to free themselves from the rules of a system that does not seek their benefit.
Berlin, as the main setting for this story, brings its own troubled history into the mix, both as the home-base of one of the greatest “culturally” motivated crimes in history, and as it was immediately afterwards controlled by two opposite economic and political systems that co-existed for almost half a century.
These histories, un-functional shadows of value systems, are the broken tools befitting scattered peoples, who lost their self-proclaimed persona. These are the people that are portrayed in this film.