Haydar Taştan moves between Cologne and Istanbul, between photography, cinema, and immersive media. Trained as a journalist, he first encountered storytelling through the lens of documentary photography. His images have appeared in The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and Amnesty Journal, and have been exhibited in Istanbul, Yerevan, and Berlin. In 2017, he published Dark Harmonies, a photo book shaped by roads and rain.
Over time, still frames gave way to motion. His short films drift between memory and fiction, realism and abstraction. Cengiz (2020) received multiple awards, including Best Director at the Baku International Film Festival, and was screened at numerous national and international festivals such as Antalya and Istanbul. Ruzname (2024) premiered in competition at the 25 FPS Experimental Film and Video Festival in Zagreb.
His current practice weaves together cinema, photography, and XR-based narratives—working through the possibilities of expanded cinema and immersive environments to construct layered aesthetic experiences. He is currently studying in the Digital Narratives MA program at Internationale Filmschule Köln, and is a co-founder of Filmveron, a production company committed to opening new perspectives on the film form.