Director and screenwriter Pelin Esmer attended Yavuz Özkan's Z1 Film Workshop after studying sociology at Boğaziçi University. After working as an assistant director in documentaries and fiction films, she founded her own film company, Sinefilm, and started making independent films since 2001.

The first international screening of the documentary film Oyun (2005) was held at the San Sebastian Film Festival. The film was shown at more than fifty festivals around the world and received many awards, including the Best Documentary Director Award at the Tribeca Film Festival. Her first fiction film, 11’e 10 Kala (2009), was one of the six projects selected for the Cannes Film Festival Cinefondation, where she completed the script of her film. 11’e 10 Kala was screened in the official selection of the San Sebastian Film Festival, received many international awards, and was released in Turkey, France and Germany. Her second fiction film, Gözetleme Kulesi (2012), which premiered at the Toronto and Rotterdam film festivals, was screened in many countries and in five different states of the USA as part of the Caravanserai Program. Her third fiction film, İşe Yarar Bir Şey (2017), received the FIPRESCI Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actress awards in Turkey, as well as the Best Screenplay award at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. She was invited to Berlin by the DAAD Artist-in-Residence Program in 2018, developed the documentary film Kraliçe Lear (2019) there. Kraliçe Lear, which premiered at the Sarajevo Film Festival, continued its journey at international festivals and received the Yılmaz Güney Award and the SIYAD Cüneyt Cebenoyan Award at the Adana Altın Koza Film Festival in Turkey. Pelin Esmer, who was invited by the Camargo Foundation to the artist residency in Cassis, France, in the fall of 2019 and started working on her project titled O Da Bir Şey Mi. The post-production process of the film continues.