Mehmet Aktaş

Mehmet Aktaş — Biography

Born in 1966 in Iğdır, Kurdish-Turkish filmmaker Mehmet Aktaş works as a producer, screenwriter and journalist. After finishing law studies in Istanbul, he relocated to Germany in the mid-1990s, where he noticed that German audiences paid little attention to cinema from the Near East, particularly Kurdish film. In response, he launched Germany's first Kurdish Film Festival in 2002 with backing from the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, and soon after founded the Berlin-based production and distribution house Mîtosfilm.

Through Mîtosfilm, Aktaş produced titles such as Close up Kurdistan (2007), Land of Legend (2008) and Après la Chute (2009), and in 2009 produced Bahman Ghobadi's No One Knows About Persian Cats, which earned the Un Certain Regard honor at Cannes. From 2004 onward, the company also distributed films including Turtles Can Fly, Two Girls from Istanbul, Süt and Min Dît in German cinemas, reflecting Aktaş's aim of presenting a more authentic picture of life in the region than typical news coverage.

In 2014 he wrote the screenplay for Hisham Zaman's Letter to the King and co-produced Memories on Stone with director Shawkat Amin Korki, which won Best Film from the Arab World at Abu Dhabi. He went on to produce or executive-produce later features such as Hüseyin Tabak's The Legend of the Ugly King (Toronto, 2017) and Hussein Hassan's The Rain Bride (Göteborg premiere, 2023), and has served as artistic director of the Duhok International Film Festival since 2011.