Metin Erksan

Born in 1929, Metin Erksan rolled onto the Turkish film scene with a whole different vibe—he wasn’t just cranking out movies for cheap laughs or popcorn-eating crowds. The guy actually studied art history at Istanbul University, so he showed up with some serious ideas about what cinema could be. Plus, with his brother Cetin Karamanbey already messing around with cameras (though, let’s be real, not exactly a household name), Metin didn’t have to wait long before getting his own hands dirty in the business. He started out as his brother’s assistant, but that didn’t last long. Pretty soon, he wrote the script for “Binnaz” in 1950, and boom—he was in. Like lots of film nerds back then, he wrote for newspapers and movie mags before jumping into the director’s chair. His first big splash? “Asik Veysel’in Hayati” (1952), a biopic about the legendary blind poet Asik Veysel. The censors freaked out and banned it, apparently because it didn’t paint Turkey as some lush paradise. Typical. After the 1960 coup, social realism took over Turkish cinema, and Erksan was right there leading the charge. He scored big with “Susuz Yaz” (Dry Summer), which snagged the Golden Bear in Berlin—a huge deal. His films mashed up things like existential loneliness, Marxist vibes, and good-vs-evil showdowns. Not just an artist, he was all about activism—helped start the Turkish Film Workers Union, ran for parliament, the whole nine yards. But by the late ’60s, he pivoted—let’s just say the bills had to get paid. He started making crowd-pleasers and darker, weirder personal stuff. Eventually, he drifted away from movies, ending up teaching film in Istanbul, mostly off the radar but still a legend in his own right.