Cana Bilir-Meier: Ein neues Wort

Cana Bilir-Meier (*1987) is a filmmaker and artist based in Munich. Her films, performances, and texts address the resistant and invisible aspects of (post-)migrant realities and biographies from a perspective that is often very personal—connecting these aspects to questions of history, memory, and archive.

Her most recent filmic work, “Ein neues Wort” (A New Word, 2025), is presented in the Cosmos and was commissioned by SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA in Berlin. The film builds on a competition held by the West German broadcaster WDR, which in 1970 sought an alternative to the term “Gastarbeiter” (guest worker) and received over 32,000 submissions. Together with a Munich choir that has been performing for over forty years, made up predominantly of former labor migrants of Turkish descent, the artist developed a musical engagement with these proposals. Choir member Fatoş Haug wrote the lyrics and reinterpreted the traditional German children’s song “Die Eisenbahn” (The Railroad). It is a reappropriation of words that at times appear overtly racist, often derogatory, or absurd and emptied of meaning. The rehearsal process through to performance becomes the subject of the film itself—a shared and binding negotiation of linguistic attributions that wound and unsettle.