Can an actor make a life in “crime”? Like a James Gandolfini, can he or she overcome genre type-casting and launch an international career? Let’s take a closer look at the intriguing array of actors, many of them Germans with an immigrant background, in the latest GOETHE FILMS program this October, which features three gangster films: Dealer by Thomas Arslan, Chiko by Özgur Yildirim, and Stronger Than Blood by Oliver Kienle.
In Dealer, the main character Can unsuccessfully tries to escape his life as a drug dealer in the German capital. Actor Tamer Yiğit was born and raised in Berlin, his parents emigrated from Turkey.
Yiğit started his “gangster” career with Dealer in 1999 and mostly stayed true to the genre he works in so well, being a familiar face in many German crime TV series since. But he balances that career focus with his own side projects. His directorial endeavour Karaman was invited to the Perspektive Deutsches Kino at the Berlinale 2012. An international audience will remember him from Anton Corbijn’s 2014 le Carré adaptation A Most Wanted Man, where he played boxer Melik Oktay.
Idil Üner’s career —here playing Can’s lover trying to convince him to give up his career as a small time-dealer— continued successfully but also decidedly more mainstream after Dealer. After becoming more widely known to a larger audience in Fatih Akin's In July, she showed off her singing skills in Akin's Head-On, maginificently heading Selim Sesler's Orchestra against the backdrop of the Bosporus. Üner is now playing the self-assured wife of a Turkish police inspector in a German TV series set in Istanbul.
Birol Ünel’s career is intense and tragic. Born in Turkey, his parents moved the family to Germany when he was a child, and he became a well-known stage actor, playing Siegfried in uber-director Frank Castorf's Nibelungs at Volksbühne Theatre in Berlin in 1994. After Dealer, his on-screen career blossomed as he was cast in one of the most expensive European productions to date —Enemy at the Gates— as well as Fatih Akin’s masterpiece Head-On and later Soul Kitchen. Unfortunately, his fictional characters seem to mimic real life: His unforgettable performance as a manic alcoholic in Head-On became a sad deja-vu when the German yellow press published photos of him living homeless and drunk in the streets of Berlin. He hasn’t worked as an actor in years.
And if you know your German arthouse really well, you will recognize a young Angela Schanelec --the revered director of THE DREAMED PATH and I WAS AT HOME BUT-- as the babysitting friend Eva.
To be continued with Chiko...
by Philipp Gilly &
Jutta Brendemühl 
