Matthias Drawe (born 4 February 1963 in East Berlin) is a German filmmaker, writer, actor and journalist.
Drawe grew up in a DEFA building at the border of Potsdam-Babelsberg and West Berlin. In 1970 he managed to defect to West Berlin together with his father, , a former DEFA dramatist, and his mother in a spectacular escape. Risking their lives, they jumped over the Berlin Wall by using an unsecured film ladder.
At the beginning of the 1980s Drawe lived in a squatted house in Berlin-Kreuzberg, taking part in the fight for affordable housing, which provides the backdrop for his novel Wild Years in West Berlin.
In 1987, through a mutual friend, he met Turkish director Serif Gören who had directed the critically acclaimed Yol - The Path (1982) for the incarcerated Yilmaz Güney. Gören had chosen Berlin-Kreuzberg, which has a high concentration of Turkish immigrants, as the backdrop for his comedy ' (1988) starring Turkish actor Kemal Sunal. Gören cast Drawe as a small-time crook.
Inspired by Gören, Drawe took up filmmaking in 1988 shooting The Art of Being a Man (1989) on Russian black and white stock smuggled into West-Berlin from East Germany. In 1991 he founded Kellerkino a small art-house cinema in Berlin-Kreuzberg, which specialized in independent films and screened the early shorts of the then unknown Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who would later win an Oscar for The Lives of Others.
After having shot <span class="plainlinks">King of Kreuzberg</span> (1990) and <span class="plainlinks">The Ivory Tower</span> (1992) in Berlin, Drawe moved to New York City and worked as a journalist for <span class="plainlinks">Deutschlandradio Kultur</span>, the German equivalent of NPR. Drawe's radio features from around the world were brought to life by voice actor Christian Brückner, who provides the official German voice for Robert De Niro, thereby giving German listeners the impression that it was De Niro reporting.