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Anne Zohra Berrached was born in Erfurt (then part of the German Democratic Republic) on July 31 1982. She studied social pedagogy and subsequently worked for two years as a drama teacher in London. Following a one-year stay in Cameroon and Spain, she moved to Berlin. While attending child actors on the set of a student film, she became intrigued by the director's job and later applied at the HFF Potsdam-Babelsberg – which didn't accept her. Instead, she enrolled at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg in 2009. The same year, she completed her first short documentary "Der Pausenclown", which follows a Lebanese musician in Berlin. The film premiered at the 2010 Munich Short Film Festival and later also aired on network television. Berrached's short documentary "Heilige und Hure" (2012), about a family man from rural Swabia who leads a double life as a bisexual and crossdressing polygamist with the consent of his wife, also screened at several international festivals.
She made her feature film debut with "Zwei Mütter" (2013), which portrays a lesbian couple longing for a child. The film won the 'Dialogues en Perspective' Award at the 2013 Berlin IFF and the No Fear Award at the First Step Awards.
Three years later, her sophomore feature film "24 Wochen" (2016) was the only German entry in the competition of the 2016 Berlin IFF. The drama about a couple who learns that their unborn child will be severely ill premiered to rave reviews and won the award of the Gilde Deutscher Filmkunsttheater. The film went on to garner several more festival awards before it was released theatrically in September 2016.
The "Tatort" episode "Der Fall Holdt" (2017), which she directed as an oppressive tragedy and whose story was inspired by the real-life criminal case Maria Bögerl, also received much critical praise.
Berrached then began work on her third feature film: "Die Welt wird eine andere sein" ("Copilot"), about a young woman's love for a man who, years later, will be one of the assassins of September 11, 2001. The film premiered in the Competition of the 2021 Berlinale.
In addition to her work as a filmmaker, Anne Zohra Berrached has given directing workshops for the Goethe-Institut Cairo, at the Festival International de Cine de Guadalajara in Mexico, and in Germany at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, among others. She lives and works in Leipzig and Berlin.