Seyfi Havaeri

Seyfi Havaeri — Biography

Seyfi Havaeri (July 1920, Istanbul – 24 January 2009, Istanbul) was one of the most prolific director-screenwriters of Turkey's Yeşilçam era. His exact birthday is disputed: Turkish Wikipedia and the SinemaTürk database give 19 July, Wikidata and DBpedia give 18 July, and English Wikipedia gives 17 July; all sources agree on the year and on Istanbul as both his birth and death city.

He attended high school for a time and appeared on stage with the Raşit Rıza, Burhanettin Tepsi and Sadi Tek theatre companies before moving into film. His directing debut falls in the late 1940s — SinemaTürk dates it to Yara in 1947, while Persian Wikipedia puts his first film a year later, in 1948. Over the following three decades he directed close to forty features, wrote a comparable number of screenplays, and occasionally acted himself.

Titles credited to him include Kore Gazileri (1951), Zafer Güneşi — known internationally as The Victory Sun (1953) — Çingene (1966) and Zafer Kartalları (1974). Regarded as one of the longest-working directors in Turkish cinema, he received the Golden Orange Life Achievement Award.