Deniz Gamze Ergüven

Deniz Gamze Ergüven — Biography

Born in Ankara but raised in France after her family moved there in the 1980s, Deniz Gamze Ergüven completed her schooling in France and graduated from La Fémis film school in Paris in 2008. Invited to the Cannes Film Festival's Atelier program in 2011, she met fellow director Alice Winocour there; unable to secure financing for an earlier project, she took Winocour's suggestion to write something more intimate, which became the script for Mustang (2015), the story of five orphaned sisters.

Mustang screened in the Directors' Fortnight at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Europa Cinemas Label Award, also played at the Toronto International Film Festival, represented France for Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards, and won the César Awards for Best First Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay. Ergüven was pregnant during the shoot and gave birth to her son on 11 February 2015. In 2016 she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences alongside fellow Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

She went on to direct Kings, starring Halle Berry and Daniel Craig and set during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, then moved into television, directing episodes of 'The First', 'The Handmaid's Tale', 'Perry Mason' and 'The Last Time He Told Me'.