Hakan Savaş Mican

Hakan Savaş Mican — Biography

Hakan Savaş Mican is a film and theatre director, playwright and producer who brings stories of migration between Germany and Turkey to both screen and stage. He holds Turkish and German citizenship, and his work looks at the lives of Turkish-Germans caught up in the East-West divide. He has been active in cinema and theatre since 2008.

He began with short films: Drei Annäherungen (2005), Muttermal (2006) and Fremd.Yaban (2007), which drew some praise. The thirty-minute Adems Sohn aired on German television in 2008 and was previewed at the 13th Turkey/Germany Film Festival in Nuremberg. Around the same time he turned to the stage: in 2009 he completed the play Die Schwäne vom Schlachthof, and for the Ballhaus Naunynstraße he wrote and directed Der Besuch/Ziyaret (2009) and Schnee (2010), loosely based on Orhan Pamuk's novel. He then directed at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, staging Marianna Salzmann's Beg your pardon and Schwimmen lernen – ein Lovesong; the latter earned an invitation to the Radikal jung festival of young directors at the Münchner Volkstheater in 2014, the year he also staged Kasimir und Karoline in Heidelberg. His film Westend was released in Turkey in 2019.

Mican describes his style as unspectacular and down-to-earth, and says he works less with actors than with people whose individuality he builds into the characters. Born in Berlin to Turkish immigrants, he grew up with his grandmother in Turkey, studied architecture in Berlin and then trained as a director at the German Film and Television Academy (dffb).