Fatih Akin

Fatih Akın (August 25, 1973 in Hamburg, Germany) is a European Film Award winning German film director of Turkish descent.[1][2][3]
Family
Fatih Akın has been married since 2004 to German-Mexican actress Monique Obermüller and currently lives in Hamburg, Germany. His brother Cem Akın is also an actor.

[edit] Education
In 1994 he attended Hamburg's College of Fine Arts to study visual communications and graduated in 2000.

[edit] Work
Akın made his debut as director of a full length film as early as 1998 with Kurz und schmerzlos (Short Sharp Shock), which brought him the "Bronze Leopard" award at Locarno, Switzerland and the "Pierrot", the Bavarian Film Award for the best young director in Munich the same year. Since then he has directed feature films such as Im Juli (In July) in 2000, Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren (We forgot to go back) in 2001 and Solino in 2002. His fourth work, Gegen die Wand (Head-On) with Sibel Kekilli as the leading actress was a great success in 2004 and received several prizes, among them the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival and the "Best Film" and the "Audience Award" at the 2004 European Film Awards.
In 2005 he directed a documentary about the Istanbul music scene, named Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul, which includes musicians from Ceza to Sezen Aksu to Aynur and Brenna MacCrimmon. It is narrated by a member of a German experimental band Einstürzende Neubauten, Alexander Hacke, who also produced music for Head-On.
In 2006, he was investigated by German police after wearing a T-Shirt with a Nazi swastika, intending to equate the George W. Bush administration with the Third Reich.
In 2007, Akin's The Edge of Heaven, a German-Turkish cross-cultural tale of loss, mourning and forgiveness, won the prize for best screenplay at the 60th Annual 2007 Cannes Film Festival.[4] On October 24, 2007, the same film was awarded the first edition of the LUX prize for European cinema by the European Parliament.

[edit] Themes
In Fatih Akın's cinema, the lives of German Turks are a recurring theme. Their struggles and their confusion about two different cultures. In Head-On, two different cultures are presented, the conservative Muslim and Turkish view of Sibel's family, and Sibel's open ideas about sex. Cahit is presented to be somewhat a mixture of these two ideas and cultures, representing a struggling Turk. Akin, on the other hand, has never denied his Turkish roots and even accepted the Cannes award in the name of Turkish cinema.[5]

[edit] Political controversy
Akin has been criticized for actions that have been interpreted by some [6] as trivializing the holocaust and was investigated by German police for wearing a T-shirt with a Nazi swastika in place of the letter "S" in the word "BUSH". [7] Akin defended the T-Shirt as being "more than mere provocation" and emphasized: "Bush's policy is comparable with that of the Third Reich. I think that under Bush, Hollywood has been making certain films at the request of The Pentagon to normalise things like torture and Guantanamo. I'm convinced the Bush administration wants a third world war. I think they're fascists." [8]