Özgür Özata

Özgür Özata — Biography

Özgür Özata grew up in Berlin, acted for a time and now works as a German journalist of Turkish origin. He went in front of the camera at thirteen and appeared in many German television and cinema productions; in later years he turned to publishing and worked on Berlintürk, a news portal and magazine for Berlin's Turkish community.

Born in İskenderun, Özata moved to Berlin with his family in 1980; his mother was a journalist and his father a German-Turkish-Russian translator. His first film was Der Millionenerbe, led by Günter Pfitzmann. In the 1990s he appeared in productions such as Die Fallers, Die Bademeister, Für alle Fälle Stefanie and Sperling und der brennende Arm, and had a role in Aprilkinder (1998). In 2001 he took private lessons from Nina Gaidarova at The Actors Studio in New York. Through the first Turkish-German actors' agency in Germany, founded by Tayfun Bademsoy in 1990, he met German directors and acted in more than thirty films by 2007.

In the 2000s he acted in the series Küstenwache, Wolffs Revier, Balko, Siska, König von Kreuzberg, Ein Fall für zwei, Hausmeister Krause and Alles Atze, and in the films Poppitz, Counterparts and The Moon and Other Lovers; Counterparts earned an honourable mention at Cannes's Directors' Fortnight in 2007. He is a member of the German Federal Association of Film and Television Actors. In July 2011 he joined the editorial management of berlinturk.de, and since February 2012 he has been publisher of the free monthly news magazine of the same name.