Hesam Yousefi is a German-Iranian-Kurdish filmmaker born in 1989 in Piranshahr (Kurdistan/Iran). From 2009 to 2016, he worked as a human rights journalist. During his studies at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (2018–2023), he began exploring social and political issues through the medium of film. His works are characterized by a strong socio-political perspective and create space for collective memory. Since October 2023, he has been studying in the postgraduate program at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Anfal – Eight Lives, One Genocide, his postgraduate thesis film, is an 83-minute documentary that documents the systematic extermination of the Kurdish population by the Iraqi Baath regime in 1988.