| Occupation: | Film director and editor |
| Years Active: | 2001–present |
Sebastian Marka (born 1978 in Geneva, Switzerland) is a German film director and editor.
Sebastian Marka was born in Geneva in 1978 and grew up in Königsbach-Stein near Karlsruhe. Marka began studying at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in 2001 and graduated in 2005 with a degree in Film & Media.[1]
While still a student, Marka began working as a film editor. He edited commercials, short- and feature films. After graduating, he continued his editing work and was responsible for editing several Television productions such as Unschuldig or 100 Code, an internationally co-produced Swedish crime drama series.
In 2010 Marka's short film - thriller Interview[2] was released, for which he received many awards at German and international film festivals.
Due to the success of his short film Interview he received his first directing assignments. After directing five episodes of the German TV series, Marka subsequently shot ten 90-minute episodes of the popular German police crime drama series since 2013, three of which he edited himself.
The award-winning three -episodes Long Live Death (Tatort: Es lebe der Tod), Tatort: Die Wahrheit, Tatort: Meta, and four other episodes were created in collaboration with Erol Yesilkaya. He wrote the screenplays for all seven episodes. Marka had met Yesilkaya in 2012 and worked with him frequently until then.
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.[3]
On October 20, 2020, Marka's dystopian TV - Science fiction film Exit was broadcast on the nationwide German television channel Das Erste. Yesilkaya again wrote the screenplay for the film, which 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.)[4]
Marka and Yesilkaya also filmed the German fantasy novel The Gryphon (Der Greif, 1989) by Wolfgang Hohlbein as television series for Amazon Prime Video. Here, Marka was showrunner alongside Yesilkaya and directed four episodes. The Gryphon was released on Amazon Prime on May 25, 2023.[5]
The released -episodes by Marka were almost all praised by the German press and received good IMDb ratings.
For example, the German film critic Rainer Tittelbach wrote in October 2018, that Marka had created "exceptional crime films" (Ausnahmekrimis).[6]
Spiegel Online - critic Christian Buß also wrote in a 2018 - review, that Marka had "repeatedly artfully widened the format of the series with cinematic '-episodes' such as the Berlin episode 'Meta' or the 'Se7en' variation" for the Frankfurt edition (hat mit cineastischen "Tatorten" wie der Berliner Folge "Meta" oder der "Se7en"-Variation [...] immer wieder kunstvoll das Format der Reihe geweitet).[7]
In addition, some of the - episodes won national and international awards. For example, the episode Long Live Death celebrated its international premiere at the Austin Film Festival in 2016. And Marka won an audience award for it at the Nashville Film Festival in 2017 and received a jury award at the Garden State Film Festival in 2017.
For the -episode Die Wahrheit Marka and screenwriter Erol Yesilkaya were nominated for the prestigious Grimme Award in 2017. They received the Grimme Award in 2019 for their -episode Meta.
Long Live Death (Tatort: Es lebe der Tod)
Tatort: Die Wahrheit
Tatort: Meta