Stefan Sarazin

Biography

Stefan Sarazin, born in 1964, first worked as a photo assistant, but then changed professions and attended acting schools in Munich and New York from 1982 to 1986. In 1989 he began studying at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film (HFF) in Munich; he also studied directing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. Together with Alaric Hamacher and Bernd Reufels he directed the road movie "Passacör" (1993). He graduated from the HFF in 1996 with the coming-of-age film "Nackter Himmel".  In the same year, his screenplay entitled "Nitschewo" won the European Script Award. In 2001, he turned the script into a feature film, that tells the story of a disoriented young man in the German provinces whose life is thrown off course by various events. The premiere took place in October 2003 at the Hof Film Festival.  

Between 2002 and 2007, Sarazin made several trips to the Sinai desert and the Middle East, during which he developed the idea for a screenplay that he eventually wrote together with Peter Keller: "No Name Restaurant," as the working title, was awarded the German Screenplay Prize in 2011. Filming under the direction of the duo began six years later, in November 2017, in Haifa, the West Bank and Jericho, and lasted until April 2018. The finished film, about an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn who becomes stranded with a taciturn Bedouin in the Sinai desert, premiered under the title "Nicht ganz koscher - Eine göttliche Komödie" ("No Name Restaurant") at the 2022 Munich Film Festival, where it won the One Future Award. At the Bavarian Film Awards, the comedy won the Producer's Award.