Jonas Schaffter was born in 1988 in the farming village of Metzerlen in Solothurn. He attended the Academy of Art and Design (HGK) in Basel and graduated in 2013 with a bachelor’s degree in visual communication. During a one-year stay in Istanbul he studied photography for a semester at Mimar Sinan Fine Art University. He then worked as a photographer and filmmaker on the Bosporus and at the point de vue production company in Basel. Over a three-year period beginning in 2016, Jonas Schaffter completed his master’s degree in film studies at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), specializing in documentary film production. During this time he made Arada, his first feature-length documentary film.