Biyografi Dünyası
Cem Yılmaz
Photo: Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

Cem Yılmaz

Actor · 53 years old

Biography

Profile

Age53
Birth dateApril 23, 1973
BirthplaceIstanbul
ProfessionActor, Writer, Film director, Screenwriter
Zodiac signTaurus

In the rankings

Worked most often with

Filmography / Projects

Cem Yılmaz — Biography

Cem Yılmaz is Turkey's best-known stand-up comedian and also an actor, screenwriter and director whose films have repeatedly been box-office hits. His own film series include G.O.R.A. and Karakomik Filmler, he also starred in Yılmaz Erdoğan's Vizontele and Organize İşler, and in recent years his own character Erşan Kuneri drew attention at home and abroad through a Netflix series. He also draws cartoons and works in music.

While studying tourism at Boğaziçi University he began drawing for the magazine Leman, gave his first show in 1995 at the Leman Cultural Centre in the magazine's building, and then made his name with shows at the Beşiktaş Cultural Centre. He entered film in 1998 with Her Şey Çok Güzel Olacak and appeared in Vizontele; his real breakthrough was G.O.R.A., released in 2004, which he wrote and in which he played four characters. A.R.O.G, Hokkabaz, Yahşi Batı and Av Mevsimi followed. He later moved into directing and producing as well, with Pek Yakında, Ali Baba ve Yedi Cüceler, Arif V 216 and Karakomik Filmler. Among international productions he appeared in Russell Crowe's The Water Diviner, and he has voiced several animated films, Zootropolis among them.

He won best actor awards for Hokkabaz, Av Mevsimi and İftarlık Gazoz and a Sadri Alışık award for best supporting actor for Organize İşler; in 2018 he received the Antalya Film Festival lifetime honor award. He has twice conducted the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra.

Reactions

You can pick up to 3 reactions.

Their work through different eyes

AI-assisted editorial takes on this person's screen work, written from different viewer perspectives. They are not reader comments; those are below.

Family Viewer Asks whether the whole household can watch it; cares about humor and heart.

Among Cem Yılmaz's films, the one best suited to watching with the whole household is İftarlık Gazoz, the warm story of young Adem apprenticed to the soda maker Cibar Kemal in an Aegean town in the early seventies; children and grandparents will laugh at the same moments. G.O.R.A, with the carpet seller Arif abducted by aliens, is a science-fiction comedy teenagers will love. Organize İşler, a crime comedy set in Istanbul's underworld, is best kept for after the children are in bed.

Cinephile Looks at script, editing and directing choices; keeps a distance from formula films.

The films Cem Yılmaz writes and directs himself are increasingly closing in on their own universe. Arif V 216 is the third link in the Arif series, again built on him playing more than one character, and crowded with impersonations of famous figures; Karakomik Filmler joins two mid-length films in a single screening, a structure close to the sketch logic of his stage shows. These forms show off his timing and his knack for creating types, but leave little room for depth of character. His most interesting work as an actor is in another director's hands: in Yavuz Turgul's Av Mevsimi, Crazy İdris, a homicide detective still passionately attached to his ex-wife, is a part that pushes the comedian into the background within the trio he forms with Şener Şen and Okan Yalabık. For viewers who know Yılmaz the comedian, this İdris is the role with the most to tell them.

History & Society Lens Asks about the period, the social background and what the work reflects.

The work Cem Yılmaz acts in and writes keeps going back to the seventies. Vizontele sets television's arrival in a town in Hakkâri barely connected to the outside world; İftarlık Gazoz spends a Ramadan summer with the soda maker Cibar Kemal and his apprentice Adem in an Aegean town; Erşan Kuneri portrays the film business of those years around a producer trying to escape erotic films for other genres. In all three the period is both an object of longing and a target of mockery: the provinces meeting technology, the bond between master and apprentice in a small town, a film industry forced to keep reinventing itself. In this work Yılmaz holds up a mirror in which today's viewers can look at the recent past with affection and irony, and İftarlık Gazoz is where affection most outweighs irony.

Comments