Kadir Sözen

Kadir Sözen — Biography

Born into a working-class family in Gaziantep, Sözen emigrated with his family to West Germany in 1969 and grew up in Mönchengladbach; while still at school he began working as a freelance radio journalist for WDR. Trade-union and political activism won him a Hans Böckler Foundation scholarship in 1986 to study economics in Cologne, where he graduated in 1990, the same year WDR filmed his first screenplay, Sehnsucht. In 1996 he founded the production company Filmfabrik GmbH, which produced both his own work and films by others. His first feature as writer-director, Soğuk Geceler / Devlerin Ölümü, took five of eight prizes at the 1995 Adana Film Festival, and he followed it with Kış Çiçeği. His two-part television film on migration, Dilekler Zamanı, won the Adolf Grimme Prize. Takiye: Allah'ın Yolunda, made for ARD around Islamist investment fraud, provoked such controversy on its Turkish release that he received death threats. Yellow Days, a German-Turkish co-production and the first Turkish film shot in Kurdish, was banned by the Ministry of Culture immediately after its Antalya Film Festival premiere. Another German-Turkish co-production, Sonbahar (Herbst), was nominated for a European Film Award and won the CICAE Prix Art & Essai at Locarno. He also produced his own script Mutlu Kuzular (2014).