İsmet Elçi

İsmet Elçi — Biography

İsmet Elçi, born on 2 March 1964 in the village of Altınova in Turkey's Muş province, is a Germany-based writer, director, screenwriter and actor of Turkish origin. At 16, in the late 1970s, he moved to Berlin with his father, who had lost his livelihood amid the tense political situation in eastern Turkey; while working in a factory he learned German at night school and began to write.

Deeply affected by Yılmaz Güney's Sürü (1978), Elçi wrote the novel "Sinan ohne Land" (Sinan without a Land), adapted into a ZDF television mini-series in 1989. As director and screenwriter he made films including Kısmet Kısmet (1987), Düğün (1990), Cemile ve Umudun Masalı (1995) and Cemile (1996), acting in some of them as well. In 2025 villagers in his home province of Muş were reported to have watched a screening of Düğün, in which some of their own relatives had appeared thirty-five years earlier.

His work deals with migration and exile from Turkey and the country's internal political conflicts, and in 1993 he received the Adelbert von Chamisso Award.