The only film of the Berlinale that I actually saw was "Chiko", written and directed by Özgür Yildirim. It's a dark story about Chiko and Tibet, two Turkish-German best friends and small time crooks in Hamburg, trying to make it big in a messed up world of poverty and extreme wealth, conflicting loyalties, bad decisions and an all-destructive cycle of revenge. It was a quite gripping and disturbing film (despite some easily avoided logical errors).
Of course, it was no disadvantage that the main character Chiko was played by the hot and hairy half Italian, half Turkish Denis Moschitto. ^_^Moschitto had for a long time, due to his southern looks, been confined to funny "ethnic" sidekick roles. His first two main roles before "Chiko" were in comedies - as a guy who starts up a phone sex line exclusively in Turkish in "Süperseks" (2004), and as a wannabe star director in "Kebab Connection" (2005). He was born in 1977 and is a vegetarian, as IMDB informs us ...
Here is Moschitto's page at players.de. The photos are a bit old - for his role as Chiko, Moschitto built some more muscles than can be seen there ... (Photo above left by Marion Koell.)
Since Denis Moschitto is no longer a funny sidekick in this movie, Fahri Ogün Yardim (of Turkish descent, born 1980) instead takes on a bit of that role as Chiko's and Tibet's Roma-German friend Curly Adler. But he is also a bit of a "good example" and often the only voice of reason in the difficult relationship between Chiko and Tibet.And he's cute. ^_^
Here is Yardim's page at his agency Rakete.
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Oh, and can Germany be considered part of Central Asia? Well, ask Wilhelm II. (More in the German Wiki.)
About Wilhelm II:s Hun speech... it's actually rather historically correct of him to refer to the Huns, since the Germanic tribes during the so-called "Dark Ages" didn't feel any particular antagonism towards "eastern" tribes regardless of linguistic relationship. Later generations of nationalist scholars have had enormous trouble sorting out who was who and what was what according to the demands of political propaganda. For example, nobody really knows who or what the Eurasian Avars were. Many claim that they were Turkic, but there's a Caucasian people calling themselves by that name now... See also the Bulgar/Bolgar confusion. When even the Norse rulers of Rus called themselves by the Turko-Mongol "khagan", we can safely assume that people back then just didn't care about nationality or cultural differences between invented opposites such as "Europe" vs. "Asia" (of course, why would they...).
ReplyDeleteThe Germans should just embrace their "Asiatic" heritage instead of pretending to be Western... (Maybe the old French taunt about 'half-Finnic' Prussians isn't so wrong after all).
By the way, I can't wait until this film comes out on DVD, so I can make screenshots of all the "hairy" scenes with Denis Moschitto. >_<
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