Vizontele

Yılmaz Erdoğan wrote Vizontele and directed it with Ömer Faruk Sorak. Produced by the Beşiktaş Cultural Center, the comedy-drama was one of the most-watched Turkish films of its time. The plot draws on Erdoğan's own boyhood memory of a television set finally reaching his home province of Hakkâri; the story is set there, but because filming in Hakkâri was difficult it was shot in the Gevaş district of Van.

Set in the 1970s, it follows the arrival of a television set in an isolated Hakkâri town barely connected to the outside world. When officials sent to install the receiver fail to get it working, the mayor, Nazmi (Altan Erkekli), turns to Deli Emin (Yılmaz Erdoğan), regarded as mad but genuinely skilled with electronics. The hunt for a signal supplies plenty of comic mishaps, complicated further by Latif (Cezmi Baskın), owner of the town's open-air cinema, who is protecting his business and by tension between devout and secular townsfolk, until the very first broadcast news—that a soldier has died—turns the mood suddenly somber.

The cast, largely from Erdoğan's own theater company, includes Demet Akbağ, Altan Erkekli, Cem Yılmaz, Zeynep Tokuş, Şafak Sezer, Tolga Çevik, and Serhat Özcan. Released on February 2, 2001, the film won three Golden Orange awards at the Antalya Film Festival and was followed by a sequel, Vizontele Tuuba, in 2004.