Yasemin Şamdereli

Yasemin Şamdereli — Biography

Yasemin Şamdereli is the director and screenwriter known for Almanya – Willkommen in Deutschland (Almanya: Welcome to Germany, 2011), a comedy about three generations of a Turkish migrant family in Germany. The film brought her the German Film Award in 2011. Her second feature film, Samia, was released in 2025.

She was born in Dortmund, the child of one of the first worker families who went from Tunceli to Germany in 1959; the family's origin is described as Kurdish Zaza. She completed her schooling in Munich and entered the University of Television and Film Munich. As a student she drew attention with a trial film made with the cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, Das filmende Klassenzimmer; she then began working freelance for Bavaria Film as an assistant director, taking part in international productions including Jackie Chan's Who Am I?. Her own directing produced seven films between 1994 and 2006, among them Kismet (which won the most popular film prize at the Short Tiger event in 2000), Sextasy and Ich Chef, du nix!. The television comedy Alles getürkt! (2002), made for ProSieben, made her name known across Germany. She was also a co-writer of the television series Türkisch für Anfänger and appeared as an actress in the short film Delicious (2004).

The cast of Almanya included Katharina Thalbach, Axel Milberg and Denis Moschitto. The film had its U.S. premiere at the Berlin and Beyond Film Festival in San Francisco on 20 October 2011. Her work has also won a Bavarian Film Award.