Ali Samadi Ahadi

Artist in Residence (Director and screenwriter, Cologne)

Curriculum Vitae

Ali Samadi Ahadi is a prize-winning director and screenwriter. Born in Tabriz, Iran, he fled to Germany due to the First Gulf War at age 13. Upon graduating from high school in 1992, he studied social sciences, design for electronic media and visual communication in Hannover and Kassel. He has been working as a freelance director and screenwriter for over 10 years.
In 2006, he received the German Film Award in the category "best documentary" for his documentary "Lost Children", produced together with Oliver Stoltz, about the fate of child soldiers in Uganda. In 2009, he was awarded the German film critics' prize in the category "Best debut feature film", for his comedy "Salami Aleikum", for which he was also awarded the 2012 CIVIS prize. He received the 2011 Grimme-prize for Information & Culture for his documentary "Iran: Elections 2009". A longer version of this documentary, titled "The Green Wave", was brought to cinemas, and was entered into the Sundance Film Festival. It received numerous further awards at international film festivals in Prague, The Hague, Geneva and Washington.
Ali Samadi Ahadi was Artist in Residence at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities "Law as Culture" from October 2011 till November 2012, during which time he worked on the movie "45 Minutes to Ramallah", which was selected as an official contribution to the Festival des Films du Monde de Montréal "Focus on World Cinema" as well as to the International Human Rights Film Festival in Nuremberg. It further ran as opening feature at the International Film Festival Osnabrück and won the jury and audience prize at the Biberach Film Festival as well as the film and media art prize by the Academy of Arts Berlin.
From February until April 2014, Ali Samadi Ahadi continued his fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities "Law as Culture" as Artist in Residence and received the Center's first "Georg Simmel Artist Stipend" ("Georg Simmel Künstlerstipendium") to support his project "Die Ministerin. Konzept-, Buch- und Stilentwicklung für einen Spielfilm", which traces and narrates the development of women's rights in recent Iranian history.