Halit Refiğ

Halit Refiğ (5 March 1934, İzmir – 11 October 2009, İstanbul) was a Turkish film director, film producer, screenwriter and writer. He made around sixty films, including feature films, documentaries and TV serials. He is considered to be the pioneer of the National Cinema movement and the initiator of the production of TV serials in Turkey.

Halit Refiğ graduated from Şişli Terakki High School in 1951 and studied engineering at Robert College in Istanbul.

Refiğ directed his first films in 8mm while he served as a military reserve officer in Korea, Japan and Ceylon. He wrote articles on cinema at newspapers in 1956 and published the Sinema Dergisi magazine together with Nijat Özön. He began his career as Atıf Yılmaz's assistant in 1957 together with Yılmaz Güney. He worked as scriptwriter for Atıf Yılmaz and Memduh Ün. His directorial debut was Forbidden Love (Yasak Aşk) (1961). His 1962 film Stranger in the City was entered into the 3rd Moscow International Film Festival.

In the 1970s, with the decline in Turkish cinema, he started to work extensively for TV. In 1974, he contributed as an instructor to the first cinema education programs initiated by the Istanbul State Fine Arts Academy (the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts of today) where he started to work as lecturer in 1975. In 1975, he directed the TV series Aşk-ı Memnu (Forbidden Love) which was aired on the Turkish Radio Television, TRT. This TV serial is considered to be the first miniseries on Turkish television stations. In 1978, he wrote a script for a documentary about the life of Mimar Sinan on commission from the Mimar Sinan University. The project was not completed but the script was published.

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