He left his history education at Boğaziçi University to study cinema and went to Paris in 1983. He graduated from the Cinema Department of Paris VIII University and completed his master's degree in the Department of Plastic Arts. He shot his first feature film, Oh Moon! a French-Turkish co-production, in 1989. In 1991, he staged Jean Genet's play Maids with an original interpretation at the Istanbul State Theatre. His second film, A Run for Money (1999), represented Turkey in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars. In 2004, he won the Best Director award at the Ankara Film Festival and the Best Screenplay award at the Adana Golden Boll Film Festival with Mommy, I’m Scared. His fourth film, Times and Winds (2006), was selected as Best Film at the Istanbul Film Festival and received the FIPRESCI Award. The film also ranked in the top five among the 100 Best Films of the Year determined by The Times and The Sunday Times in 2008. While he won the SİYAD Award at the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival with his film My Only Sunshine in 2008, his film Kosmos (2009) the following year returned from Antalya with the Best Film and Best Director awards. In 2013, he was selected as the Best Director of the Year by the Cinema Writers Association for Jîn. Big Big World, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival where it had its world premiere in 2016, also won the Best Film and Film Directors Association Best Director awards at the Adana Golden Boll Film Festival. Reha Erdem, whose films were shown at world festivals such as Toronto, Tokyo, Berlin, Tribeca, Busan and Locarno, wrote the scripts of all her films herself, except for Mommy, I’m Scared, which he wrote together with Nilüfer Güngörmüş. His latest film, Hey There! which he wrote during the global pandemic period and shot with the Zoom application in Istanbul, was released on MUBI in March 2021 and became the channel's most watched production that year. The video installation called Mimirap, prepared together with the cinematographer Florent Herry, with whom he has been working for many years, was exhibited at Akbank Sanat between May and June 2023 as part of the Prism Expanded: Poetics of Perception exhibition. His latest film, Neandria (2023), will have its world premiere at the 39th Warsaw Film Festival. He continues his projects called "Flux" and "Lucy", which he developed with Deniz Tortum.