Hakkı Kurtuluş was born on April 25, 1980 in Istanbul. He started his academic journey in the field of cinema and communication at Galatasaray University Faculty of Communication in 1998. Following his associate degree here, he completed his undergraduate degree in cinema and audiovisual studies at Lyon Lumière University between 2002 and 2004.
During the same period, he began to focus on cinema theory and cultural history in Lyon; He continued his studies in this field up to master's and doctoral levels. In 2005, he spent a year as an Erasmus student in the field of Germanistics at the University of Tübingen.
He started his directorial career with his first film There (2009), which he wrote and directed with Melik Saraçoğlu. This film, which tells the story of a family in Istanbul's reckoning, was screened at 26 festivals on four continents. Then came Journey to Bergmania in 2011. This film was a product of his master's study on the cinema of Ingmar Bergman at the University of Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle under the supervision of Jacques Aumont.
His third feature film The Nûru of My Eye, completed in 2013, was a work defined as a tragicomic autofiction and based on Melik Saraçoğlu's real life experiences. In this film, in which Kurtuluş took part as both director and actor, he later made two more short films about cinema. One of these, There are good news, move to the soil of my country, Erdi Sinemam is a hundred years old!, offered an in-depth inquiry into the early period of Turkish cinema.
In 2018, he shot Dermansız Adam and his third fiction film We Will Die Together, which tells the life of Abdullah Kozan, who was treated at Bursa Muradiye State Hospital for 47 years. In the same year, the long story Citizen Bērziņš, which he wrote together with Melik Saraçoğlu and Deniz Arslan, was published by Kırmızı Kedi Publications.
There received the "Promising New Director" award at the 21st Ankara Film Festival in 2010. The Light of My Eye won the "Best Film", "Best Screenplay" and "Best Editing" awards at the 20th Adana Golden Boll Film Festival in 2013, as well as the "Best Film" award from the SİYAD jury. The film, which had a great impact in the international arena, was honored with three awards, including the "Silver George" Special Jury Award at the 36th Moscow International Film Festival, the "Special Jury Mention Award" at the 59th Seminci Valladolid International Film Festival, and the "Best Film" award at the Ankara Accessible Films Festival.