Cholera Street

The movie is excellent at depicting the lifestyle of gypsies and the outlaws. Beyond their way of living, it's the love between an elderly prostitute and a young guy that touches me deeply every time I watch the movie. This unconventional and passionate love is accompanied by sufferings of the two as well as their cravings for each other. The Turkish gypsies' style of living, behaving and sorting things out is intensively depicted throughout the whole movie with gloomy, catchy scenes and dialogs. The director has done a great job at taking the well-known Turkish novel to a new dimension and making the film impossible to forget. It's a unique film on love, lust and revenge. For those who haven't seen it, I have to say it's a must-see movie.

Can you change your fate..? Of course not... Mustafa Altıoklar clearly proves the dominance of our fate on our lives. The film especially reflects the lifestyles of a special group of people (gypsies) in Istanbul. For some, they are disgusting; for some, outlaws; but for me: reality! No one has been so courageous to show the realities of life as Metin Kaçar(author of the original story). The film has the life itself in it: love, hate, crime, mercy, faith, honor, blood and even prostitution! Another and maybe the most important factor that makes the film worth watching at least 10 times is excellent performance of Mustafa Uğurlu(Reis). If you feel ready to face the facts of life, leave your comfortable seats for a while and go deep into narrow and gloomy streets of Istanbul... Don't hesitate, you will find yourself...

I think the movie is certainly above average. It takes place in a ghetto district, in which life is very hard. In fact, the book is about the change of this neighborhood and Salih's family due to modernization. However, the movie is more about crime and drama. In the book, we read how Salih grows from childhood to adulthood, while in the movie, he just grows up after one event. On one of the comments, a viewer has written that there are many unrealistic things in the movie. On the contrary, I found the movie very realistic. However, it is a different reality which we've never seen. It is about a neighborhood to which cops are afraid to come and every known crime is committed openly. And about the cast, the acting is really awesome. Okan Bayülgen has the central role, but even he is just diminished by the strong acting of Savaş Dinçel, Zafer Alagöz, Burak Sergen and Mustafa Uğurlu. I would also recommend you to listen to the soundtrack of the movie.

I can say that this movie is one of the best Turkish movies in the 90s knowing that it was nominated for many awards in several film festivals. The story is about a family who's living in a suburban in Istanbul. This big city, that we know better for the Bosphorus, its history and all the beauty that it's surrounded with, has also another aspect: a society even stranger to the most parts of Istanbul that still has hope and will to survive. The youngest boy of this family, Salih, is the center of the chain of events of this poor neighborhood. He falls in love with a prostitute and has to prove his power against the villain who is a threat to everyone living up there. Love, family, passion, death, pain are the main themes as well as hope and rage which define the life in this area. People need to fight in order to survive. In the end, the tragic chain of events keeps going on as if in old Greek tragedies. All of the actors are quite convincing, especially the villain played by Mustafa Uğurlu who succeeds in being a sadistic killer and his rival, the prostitute's young lover played by Okan Bayülgen who is a famous TV star in Turkey. The growing cultural differences in Turkey creates such problems not only in İstanbul, but also in many other big industrial cities. By watching this movie, you get to face the facts that these stories are real and inevitable. The suburbia in he movie is called "Kolera - Cholera" like the illness bringing only dead, but the people still have dreams and hopes and fighting against it. I highly recommend you watch this movie to see some rare examples of good Turkish films and also to know more about the life in the poor areas in Turkey.

This film was one of the worst book adaptation movies I have ever seen. Although the book was great, they changed the whole story line, added new scenes, changed the order of events and turned the film film into some kind of a Frankenstein. I can't understand how it was approved to go to market with such an amateur way of script writing.

Being a completely missed chance, acting in this movie remains as an irrelevant discussion as the conversations are completely unrealistic, and the characters are left dull again unlike the book.

I would suggest everyone to read the book, which is a marvelous piece of literature, and skip the film. This movie is nowhere near decent film making.