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Talal Derki was born on 24 July 1977 in Damascus, Syria. He studied directing at the Stavrako High Institute of Cinematographic Art and Television in Athens, Greece, until 2003. Between 2009 and 2012 he worked as a director for various Arab TV stations and as a freelance cameraman for CNN and Thomson Reuters.
In 2011, Derki began working on his first feature-length documentary, the Egyptian-German co-production "Homs - A Destroyed Dream". Derki portrays two young men who become central figures of the resistance in their Syrian hometown of Homs. The film premiered at the end of 2013 at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam and was awarded prizes at several festivals in the following months: "Homs - A Destroyed Dream" won the prizes for Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival 2014, the San Francisco International Film Festival 2014 and the Krakow Film Festival 2014.
In the same year Derki started shooting his second documentary film: For "Of Fathers and Sons - The Children of the Caliphate" (DE/QA/LB/SY) he pretended to be a follower of Syrian Salafists in his homeland, winning the trust of a radical Islamist family whose sons (12 and 13) are to become Islamic holy warriors. For two years Derki accompanied the everyday life of the family. The film's premiere took place in November 2018 at the Amsterdam Documentary Film Festival. "Of Fathers and Sons - The Children of the Caliphate" received excellent reviews and was awarded at numerous festivals, such as the Sundance Film Festival, the Dublin Film Festival and the Munich Film Festival, as well as at documentary film festivals in Thessaloniki, Zagreb, Madrid and Auckland. "Of Fathers and Sons" was also nominated for the European Film Award and the Oscar as Best Documentary. The German theatrical release took place in March 2019.