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Soleen Yusef was born on February 21, 1987, in Duhok in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region in northern Iraq. When she was nine years old, she fled to Germany with her family for political reasons, where she grew up in various places in Lower Saxony and East Frisia before the family found a permanent home in Berlin.
After completing her secondary education and technical college entrance qualification at the Berlin OSZ Modeschule, Yusef underwent a two-year training in singing and acting at the Academy Bühnenkunstschule, as well as training as a fashion tailor. In parallel, she gained practical professional experience as an assistant in production, direction, and distribution at the company mîtosfilm.
In 2008, Soleen Yusef began studying directing at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. There, she realized, among other projects, the 43-minute feature film "Trattoria" (2012), which premiered at the Berlinale 2012 in the section "Perspektive Deutsches Kino" and later aired on SWR television. In the summer of 2013, Yusef participated as a scholarship holder from the state of Baden-Württemberg in a five-week workshop at the University of California, Los Angeles, organized by the Filmakademie.
Yusef's feature-length documentary "Der NSU-Prozess – Das Protokoll des ersten Jahres" premiered at the Duisburg Film Week in 2014. With the feature film "Haus ohne Dach" ("House Without a Roof", 2016), she completed her diploma at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. The family drama, shot in her hometown of Duhok, about two siblings who grew up in Germany and return to Iraq as adults, received multiple awards, including the First Steps Award, the New German Cinema (Best Production) Award at the Munich Film Festival, and the Special Jury Prize at the Montreal World Film Fest. It premiered in German cinemas in August 2017.
After graduating, Yusef began working as a freelance filmmaker. She directed several episodes of the crime series "SOKO Leipzig" (2016) and "Meiberger" (2018), the hip-hop drama series "Skylines" (2019), and the espionage series "Deutschland 89" (2020).
With the children's film "Sieger sein" ("Winners", 2024), Soleen Yusef realized another cinematic production. The autobiographically inspired film about an eleven-year-old refugee girl from Syria who must navigate life at a Berlin "problem school" while showcasing her soccer talent was nominated for Best Children's Film at the German Film Awards 2024.