Yüksel Yavuz

Yüksel Yavuz — Biography

Yüksel Yavuz is a Kurdish Turkish-German film director and screenwriter whose films largely address minority and identity issues within the German context; he was born on 1 February 1964 in the Karakoçan district of Elazığ. In 1980 he joined his father in Hamburg, where he studied sociology and economics from 1986 to 1989 and visual communication at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts from 1992 to 1996.

His first film, the 1994 documentary Mein Vater, der Gastarbeiter, drew heavily on his own family's guest-worker history, and he cast his father as an actor both in that film and in Aprilkinder. Films he directed, including Kleine Freiheit (2003) and Close-Up Kurdistan (2007), have screened at festivals including Cannes, and earned him the Max Ophüls Award and the Amnesty International Human Rights Award for Best Film.