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Ayşe Polat, born on November 19, 1970 in Malatya, Turkey, moved with her mother and siblings to Hamburg in 1978, where her father worked as a Turkish immigrant in a mail-order company. Already as a teenager she made her first film attempts on video and Super-8. From 1991 to 1993 she studied German language and literature, philosophy and cultural studies in Berlin and Bremen. At the same time, she launched her directing career with a series of successful short films: for her short film "Entfremdet", she received the sponsorship prize at the 1991 national youth and video competition. In this milieu study, as in her other early works, Polat addressed the lives of migrants in Germany. For example, in the short film "Fremdennacht" (1992) about the suicide of asylum seeker Kemal Altun, or in the multiple award-winning short film "Ein Fest für Beyhan" (1994).
"Gräfin Sophia Hatun" (1997) received the Special Jury Prize at the 1997 Ankara International Film Festival. Two years later, Polat, who never attended a film school, made her feature-length debut with the television drama "Auslandstournee." In it, Hilmi Sözer plays a gay Turkish travesty artist who takes on the eleven-year-old daughter of a deceased colleague. The film screened at a number of international festivals and won "Best Directorial Debut" at the Ankara Film Festival. Ayşe Polat made her cinema debut in 2004 with "En Garde." The story about the friendship of two girls in a foster home premiered at the Locarno Film Festival and was promptly awarded the Silver Leopard; Maria Kwiatkowsky and Pinar Erincin received the Actress Award ex aequo for their performance. In 2005, "En Garde" also received the German Film Critics' Award.
Despite this success, Polat then took a break from film and directed her first theater work in 2006 at Berlin's Theater Hebbel am Ufer: "Otobüs" tells the story of the kidnapping of a group of German package tourists in Turkey. After a six-year break from cinema, Polat returned in 2010 with "Luk's Glück" ("Luk's Luck"). The tragicomedy about a Turkish family that hits the lottery jackpot premiered at the Hof Film Festival. There it received the Förderpreis Deutscher Film.
Polat's next film, "Die Erbin" ("The Heiress", 2013), was about a young German-Turkish woman who travels to her parents' home village to write a novel about her deceased father; in the process, she is confronted with dark sides of her own family history. The film premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, but did not receive a regular theatrical release.
In her first documentary "The Others" (2016), Polat researched the traces of the Armenian genocide in 1915. At the DOK Leipzig festival in 2016, the film was awarded the prize of the United Services Union ver.di.
In 2018/19 she directed two episodes of the ZDF crime series "Der Staatsanwalt," and in 2020 she directed the Dortmund "Tatort" episode "Masken", which aired at the end of 2021 and received a rather mixed reception from critics. Also in 2021, Polat began work on her next feature film: the feature film "Im toten Winkel" ("In the Blind Spot") told the story of a German documentary filmmaker who is confronted with the situation of the Kurds living in northeastern Turkey. The world premiere of the multi-perspectival narrated film took place at the Berlinale 2023.