Dealer

Germany

1999

74 Min

Color

1.66:1

German, Turkish

Currently 4.1/5 Stars.
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CAST Tamer Yigit, Idil Üner, Birol Ünel, Hussi Kutlucan, Lea Stefanel, Baki Davrak, Bilge Bingul, Marquard Bohm, Ramazan Coskum, Erhan Emre, Angela Schanelec, Tim Wilde, Neco Çelik, Sultan Meral-Sevim, Michael Tonke, Fernando Canqui

SOUND Heino Herrenbrück

Berlinale (Forum): FIPRESCI Prize, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, Karlovy Vary

Synopsis

Can and his girlfriend, Jale, live with their young daughter, Meral, in a tough Turkish neighbourhood of Berlin and barely manage to scrape enough money together for their existence. Can is a small-time dealer and errand-boy for drug boss Hakan, who has to keep his customers supplied within his narrowly staked out territory.

Jale, who works in the ware-house of a department store, has been pressing Can to give up this activity. Can, also fed up with his situation, sees a bright new beginning for himself and his family when Hakan offers him the prospective chance to run a bar on his very own. But Can has little control over the pressures that gradually begin to build up around him and soon finds himself floundering in quicksand… —german-films.de

Director

Thomas Arslan

Thomas Arslan was born in Braunschweig on July 16, 1962. From 1963 to 1967 he lived in Essen, and from 1967 to 1971 in Ankara, Turkey, where he attended primary school. In 1971 he returned to Essen, completing high school there in 1982. He completed his community service in Hamburg in 1984, spending 1985/86 in Munich where he studied German language and literature and history for two terms. He studied at the film school dffb in Berlin from 1986-92, and has been a screenwriter and filmmaker ever since. He took part in the Panorama section of the Berlinale in 1994 with Mach die Musik leiser; his documentary Aus der Ferne was shown in the Forum in 2006. Since 2007, he has been a professor of narrative film at the Berlin University of Arts. —filmportal.de