Erol Yesilkaya was born in Istanbul,
Turkey in 1976 and grew up in
Krefeld, Germany. After he finished the
Gymnasium and received his
Abitur, Yesilkaya worked as a
location manager. Then he studied
Modern German Literature and
Media Studies at the
University of Marburg. During his studies, Yesilkaya was involved in many film and cultural projects as a
promoter,
organizer or
projectionist and filmed various
short film scripts, many of which were his own works. After successfully completing his studies in
Marburg in 2004, Yesilkaya moved to
Hamburg, where he wrote his first
screenplay. Since 2008 Yesilkaya lives and works in
Berlin. There, he is part of a authors' collective named
Schreibkombinat Kurt Klinke. As a member of the collective, Yesilkaya has written various episodes for
police crime drama series such as
Tatort among others. In addition, he has also written screenplays for popular
drama and
television series such as
Dogs of Berlin,
Sløborn, Hausen and
Notruf Hafenkante. In 2012 Yesilkaya and the German director
Sebastian Marka had met and worked together frequently until then. The award-winning three Tatort-episodes Long Live Death (Tatort: Es lebe der Tod) , Tatort: Die Wahrheit, Tatort: Meta and four other episodes were created in collaboration with Marka. Yesilkaya wrote the screenplays for all seven episodes. In an interview with the German trade magazine
Blickpunkt:Film, Marka compares their cooperation to the "
showrunner - principle". During the process of making a film, from idea development to
film editing, Yesilkaya and Marka would be in constant exchange of information to achieve a good result. On October 20, 2020, the
dystopian TV -
Science fiction film Exit was broadcast on the nationwide German television channel
Das Erste. For the film, Yesilkaya wrote the script and Marka directed again. It is set in the year 2047 and addresses the dimension and impact of
artificial intelligence and
digital life. The German film critic Arno Frank of
Spiegel Online said, that a
"perfectly formed dystopia like "Exit" [...] has not yet been seen on public television" in Germany. (Eine formvollendete Dystopie wie "Exit" [...] hat man bei den Öffentlich-Rechtlichen noch nicht gesehen.) Yesilkaya and Marka also filmed the German
fantasy novel The Gryphon (Der Greif, 1989) by
Wolfgang Hohlbein as television series for
Amazon Prime Video. Here, Yesilkaya was
showrunner alongside Marka and responsible for the scripts.
The Gryphon was released on Amazon Prime on May 25, 2023. == Reception ==