Erdogan biopic to hit screens ahead of vote
ANKARA, Turkey: A new film about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is due to hit cinema screens weeks before an April referendum on whether to boost the president’s powers.
“Reis” (“The Chief”) stars well-known Turkish actor Reha Beyoglu as the Turkish strongman and shows his life up to 1999, beginning with the president’s childhood in a poor district of Istanbul to his rise to become the city’s mayor.
Turkish actress Ozlem Balci plays his wife Emine while child actor Batuhan Isik Gurel plays Erdogan as a boy.
The movie, the first ever feature film about Erdogan, will be released on March 3 across Turkey before the Turkish public vote on whether to approve an executive presidency on April 16.
Beyoglu, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the younger Erdogan, delivers passionate one- liners in the trailer, including “a person dies only once, if we die, let us die like a man!“
For Hudaverdi Yavuz, the film’s director, he wanted to tell Erdogan’s life because it was “really interesting” and the film’s title came from the name Erdogan has long been known by.
In a teaser shared online, a young boy — not Erdogan — watches his grandfather physically beaten for reciting the Islamic call to prayer in Arabic. It was only allowed in Turkish until 1950 after it was banned in Arabic in 1932.
Demonstrating Islam’s strength against the secular military, the young boy begins to recite the prayer in Arabic after he sees the violence.
Another clip shows a young Erdogan, who would have been seven, watching as soldiers come to the house of a man who defied the authorities to oppose the execution of then premier Adnan Menderes.
The last scene shows Erdogan looking with defiance as the narrator says a “brave hero” will grow up honorable against such oppression.