While I was growing up in NYC, in my late teens, it seemed like everyone wanted to be an actor. I too succumbed to the acting bug and enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse, learning the craft from one of the last living master thespian teachers, Sandy Meisner. A few months ago, an actor friend asked me why I had stopped acting — I mean, here I am writing about cinema but haven’t performed in at least 20 years! I admitted, quite candidly, “I wasn’t good at it,” realizing that I was speaking to someone who also sucked at the art. But he believes he’s good at it, makes a living doing it, so more power to him… Thankfully, I don’t think he picked up on my unintentional jab.

In ‘The Cemil Show’ the film’s namesake leading character, played to perfection by Ozan Celik whom you may remember from ‘Sivas’ in 2015, is someone much like my friend and me — bad at acting, but still desperate to make it. He has grown up on a diet of B-movies which look like a Turkish, seedy, R-rated B & W version of ‘Columbo’ and usually feature a villain played by a character actor named Turgay (brilliantly interpreted, in his younger incarnation by Basar Alemdar)— a mix between a young Giancarlo Giannini and what I imagine the local police chief in the Kumkapi neighborhood of Istanbul must look like — complete with undersized mustache, oversized sideburns and a Seventies suit.

Cemil is a mall cop, well, maybe more like a mall janitor actually, as he cleans up the messes left by the other security guards. One of his colleagues, the belle of the mall’s information desk, happens to be Turgay’s daughter and when Cemil finds this out, all hell breaks loose. Not right away of course, but eventually, as ‘The Cemil Show’ has more bumps, twists and turns than a taxi ride through Istanbul.

Newcomer Turkish filmmaker Baris Sarhan kept me fascinated with his unguessable script and vibrantly tinted storytelling. The film reminded me of personal Iranian favorite Mani Haghighi’s style of directing and his colorful sense of humor. This idea of films within films always entertains me. And honestly, the fashions alone in ‘The Cemil Show’, even at their most tacky and absurd are irresistible. It was no surprise to discover that the filmmaker is one of Turkey’s leading art directors.

The film noir bits are played out with such humor that they turn into “film rouge” right in front of one’s eyes. In this age of pandemic film fare, mostly filled with deep meaning gravitas, it was wonderfully entertaining to sit and watch Cemil, Burcu (played by the captivating Nesrin Cavadzade) and their supporting cast of characters sift through this absurd and yet so paradoxically plausible tale of impossible dreams.

Born in Istanbul and with a cinema education from NYU, Sarhan candidly admits, in his director’s statement that the film took eight years to make. “In this process, I changed the movie as I changed,” the filmmaker explains, continuing that “I even shot a short film version four years ago to establish the cinematic language and characters. At the end of all these years, I am still surprised to see these crazy stories and characters on the screen.” His film is a very personal journey into the idea of self and belonging. In fact, his words express that when he points out that “my narrative is about all the angst and question marks occupying my mind that could be clustered under the theme “I am visible, therefore I am” and it is told within a traditional “hero” story – that of Cemil discovering he can be a hero too. At a very high price.“

‘The Cemil Show’ world premiered on February 4th in the Big Screen Competition section of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam. Here’s to hoping you’ll be able to watch it soon on a big screen near you.