Alfred Döblin's great Berlin novel is lifted out of its own century and dropped into the city of 2015 in Berlin Alexanderplatz, Burhan Qurbani's three-hour drama about a refugee trying to become a good man in a place that keeps offering him easier ways to live. The 2020 film is a French, German and Dutch co-production.
What is Berlin Alexanderplatz about?
Francis is thirty years old and the only person to survive the boat that carried him across the Mediterranean. He reaches Berlin with no citizenship papers, no legal way to work and a private vow to live decently from now on. The city has other plans. Without documents he is pushed toward the margins, and the margins in this version of Berlin are run by people who recognise his desperation and know how to use it. What begins as a way to get by draws him deeper into the capital's criminal underside, where loyalty, love and self-respect are all tested against the simple need to survive. Qurbani keeps the shape of Döblin's story, a man who wants to be good in a world that makes goodness expensive, while rebuilding every detail around a Black African migrant in present-day Germany.
About the cast
Welket Bungué heads the cast as the refugee at the centre of the story. Jella Haase and Albrecht Schuch share the principal roles around him, with Joachim Król, Annabelle Mandeng, Nils Verkooijen, Richard Fouofié Djimeli and Faris Saleh completing the ensemble. The film asks a great deal of its leads across its long running time, and the performances carry much of the weight that the novel's famously dense narration carried on the page.
Context & significance
Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz is widely counted among the most important German-language novels of the twentieth century, and it has been adapted for the screen before. Qurbani's version is the boldest departure: rather than reconstruct the Weimar-era city, it treats the book's moral architecture as portable and asks what the same story means when the protagonist is a man who arrived in Europe by sea without permission. The result is a drama about migration, labour, exploitation and belonging, told at a scale that matches its source. At 183 minutes it is one of the longer features in the K-Time catalogue, divided into chapters that echo the novel's structure. The production brought together partners from France, Germany and the Netherlands, and the film was released in 2020. For viewers in the Iranian diaspora, its questions about arriving in a new country without a safety net will feel close to home.
Watching Berlin Alexanderplatz on Ktime
Berlin Alexanderplatz streams on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so the dense dialogue is accessible either way. Reading this page costs nothing; watching requires a sign-in to your K-Time account. The Farsi interface keeps browsing simple for Persian-speaking families, and the long running time is well suited to watching in more than one sitting.