Ayşe Şasa

Ayşe Şasa — Biography

Ayşe Şasa was born in Istanbul on 1 January 1941 to a Circassian mother and a father of half-Circassian, half-Kurdish descent; her paternal grandfather, Bekir Şasa, had headed the General Directorate of Forestry, and a forest near Eskişehir was planted in his memory. She graduated from the Arnavutköy American College for Girls, now Robert College, in 1960, then studied administrative sciences at the same school between 1963 and 1965. Describing herself as a Marxist in those years, she was deeply shaped by a close friendship with the writer Kemal Tahir, and began writing screenplays in 1963.

Over a roughly 45-year career she scripted close to thirty films, among them Son Kuşlar, Ah Güzel İstanbul, Battal Gazi Destanı, Cemo and Gramofon Avrat. Married three times, her second husband was the director Atıf Yılmaz and her third was Bülent Oran.

In the 1980s she suffered a severe psychological crisis and was diagnosed with schizophrenia; with her third husband's support she withdrew almost entirely from the film world for about a decade. Afterward she rebuilt herself intellectually, adopting a more intuitive outlook, and became known for her reflections on Ibn Arabi and Andrei Tarkovsky. She published her essays on cinema as Yeşilçam Günlüğü in 1993, followed by books such as Bir Ruh Macerası and Delilik Ülkesinden Notlar. She died of pneumonia in Istanbul on 16 June 2014 and was buried at Sahrayıcedid Cemetery.