On 5 November, Milena Aboyan’s film “Drei Kameradinnen” (Three Comrades) opens in German cinemas. Two days later, Shida Bazyar will receive the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize in Braunschweig for “Die Lücken” (The Gaps), her third novel, published in 2026. Two public occasions, two works, one author: their proximity invites us to consider Bazyar’s contemporary themes together. But it should not obscure the fact that the film and the prize offer different routes to public attention.
The adaptation is based on Bazyar’s 2021 novel Three Comrades. It centres on friends Kasih, Hani and Saya, who reunite after years apart on the estate where they once lived. When a residential building catches fire and Saya falls under suspicion, Kasih is asked about their shared history for a television report. Aboyan, who also wrote the screenplay, thus poses a question that is already the book’s starting point: who gets to tell what happened — and who is believed?
When a story changes medium
The move from novel to film is more than a change of packaging. Bazyar’s book reveals the story through a first-person narrator whose acts of remembering and telling are themselves part of the conflict. The film incorporates the television report and the reconstruction of the friendship into its structure. Storytelling thus becomes not just a theme but the visible framework of the action: memories, fragments and contradictions are meant to form a shared past, while public interpretation is already under way.
This also changes the way an audience encounters the story. In the novel, intimacy emerges through the voice and its perspective; in the film, bodies, faces and situations come into play. What this means in practice for the cinematography and performances cannot responsibly be described without having seen the film. One thing is certain: Aboyan is not merely transferring a finished source text to the screen. As director and screenwriter, she makes decisions about what the screen conveys and how it organises the source material’s perspective. She is working once again with Bayan Layla, who played the lead in Aboyan’s feature debut “Elaha”.
Bazyar’s novel focuses on everyday racism, hatred and far-right terrorism, but equally on the friendship between the three women. This constellation resists any simple division into those affected, those observing and those explaining: the friends are not merely the subjects of a public narrative but have voices and interpretations of their own. In the cinema, this tension becomes accessible to a wider audience, while the cinematic narrative form also changes the way into the story. An adaptation does not automatically make its source material more comprehensible or unambiguous; it shifts the emphasis and creates a work in its own right.
A prize for a different novel
The Raabe Prize honours not Three Comrades but Bazyar’s latest book, “Die Lücken”. In it, the jury recognises a historical panorama of a fictional place in the Hunsrück: the novel begins in the 1920s and brings together different time frames and perspectives. At its centre are memory, repression and the question of how exclusion and antisemitism persist through the history of a German community. The prize, awarded jointly by the City of Braunschweig and Deutschlandfunk, is worth 30,000 euros.
The fact that the award is being presented just two days after the cinema release creates an unusual conjunction: an older novel becomes a screen story while a more recent one receives institutional recognition. The prize brings greater attention to Bazyar’s work, but it does not turn the two books into variations on the same statement. Three Comrades tells of friendship and the present, “Die Lücken” of historical memory and its conflicts. What they share is that social conditions do not remain abstract: they become tangible through individual lives and perspectives.
For an author, this kind of visibility means more than additional reach. The film brings a story into a medium with a public sphere of its own; the literary prize singles out another book and places it within contemporary literature. It does not follow that a prize fixes the interpretation of a novel or that an adaptation definitively answers its political questions. Rather, a conversation emerges between works, media and audiences — and an opportunity to consider Bazyar’s different narrative forms side by side.
The cinema release draws attention to the question of who can tell their story and be heard in a heated public sphere. The award ceremony directs it towards the long trajectories of history through which memory and exclusion are negotiated. That both happen in the same week is no proof of a shared message. But it does reveal how literature, film and an award each create their own approaches to the themes Bazyar explores.
Original reviewed by the editors · 3 November 2026
