Erdoğan is coming to theaters next week. Yes, the film "Reis" (The Chief) - a biographic story of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is coming soon to theaters. The biopic starts with real events in 1933 and is a feature film of Erdoğan, from his days as a young boy to his rise to become the city's mayor.
Feature film about president of Turkey
The feature film tracing the early career of 12th. president of Turkish Republic's Erdoğan has a $5 million budget. Reha Beyoğlu plays the character of Erdoğan, while Özlem Balcı was cast as the First Lady Emine Erdogan.
Child actor Batuhan Isik Gurel will play Erdoğan as a boy.
"Instead of seeing him (Erdoğan) as the president, people will see him as a man who grew up in Kasımpaşa and lived in Istanbul," says the film’s producer, Ali Avcı according to the Anatolia News Agency. Director of the film Hüdaverdi Yavuz emphasized that President Erdoğan took up the childhood period in order to "stay away from polemics in the film ."
However, Producers could not avoid criticism as the first trailer of the film received more than 7,000 thumbs down on You Tube and extremely large amounts of negative comments on Ekşi Sözlük (Sour Dictionary), a popular collaborative hypertext “dictionary” in Turkey. The message board of IMDb is also full of angry posts criticizing the filmmakers.
Poor reaction from viewers
Indeed, the most interesting part about the movie was the IMDb vs. Dictator Erdoğan scandal. When the first appeared on IMDb - a worldwide online movie database, the biographic movie in the introduction text described Erdoğan as a “dictator”, yet was later replaced by the word “politician” due to bad reactions.
Following this, "Reis" was trolled in IMDb again this time by hackers posting fun meme pictures of Erdoğan instead of film photos.
Nevertheless, this is not the only fun story about the movie. Gokhan Aslan, who is the voice actor behind the "Reis" was making YouTube videos on comedy-parodies of Erdoğan. Discovered by the producers - he then was invited to the casting of the film.
"Reis" is coming out next week, on December 9, 2016, three weeks late than trailer’s release announcement.
