Akhtem Seitablayev

Akhtem Seitablayev
Native name	Ahtem Şevket oğlu Seitablayev
Born	11 December 1972 Yangiyo‘l, Uzbek SSR
Occupation	film director actor
Years active	1999 – present
Notable work	Haytarma (2013) Cyborgs: Heroes Never Die (2017)

Akhtem Seitablayev (Crimean Tatar: Ahtem Şevket oğlu Seytablayev; born 11 December 1972 in Yangiyo‘l, Uzbek SSR) is a Crimean-Tatar actor, screenwriter, and film director based in Ukraine. He is the director of several high-profile films, including Haytarma in 2013 and Another's Prayer in 2017. He has expressed opposition to the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and his films about the fate of several prominent Crimean Tatars have been criticized by Russian news outlets.

Early life

Seitablayev was born in 1972 in Yangiyo‘l, then part of the Uzbek SSR. His parents were deported to Uzbekistan in the Sürgün since Crimean Tatars were one of the ten ethnic groups to experience collective punishment of exile in the Stalin era. He attended school in Uzbekistan and remained in exile with his family until they moved back to Crimea during the Perestroika era in 1989, where he began his film career in 1992 after graduating from the Crimean Cultural Enlightenment School.^[1][2][3]

Career

From 1992 to 2004 he worked at the Simferopol State Crimean Tatar Theater, where he directed several plays including works of Alexander Pushkin. In 2005 he began working at the Kiev Academic Theatre of Drama and Comedy on the left-bank of Dnieper. In 2009 he directed his first film, Quartet for Two. In 2013 he directed the movie Haytarma (English: Return) based on the real life of Amet-khan Sultan, a Crimean Tatar flying ace and twice Hero of the Soviet Union who witnessed the Sürgün but managed to avoid deportation due to his father's Lak ancestory and the intervention of Timofey Khryukin, commander of the 8th Air Army. The film was praised by the Kiev Post as "must-see for history enthusiasts" and criticized by Komsomolskaya Pravda for depicting the organizers of the deportation in a bad light.^[4][5]

From 2016 to 2017 he directed Another's Prayer, based on the real life of Saide Arifova, a kindergarten director who saved over 80 Jewish children during the Holocaust by switching their ethnicity listing and teaching them to imitate Crimean Tatar customs and language to hide them from the Gestapo. Eventually the Nazis suspected she was involved in hiding Jewish children and tortured her, but she refused to betray any names. After the Red Army retook control of Crimea she saved them again by explaining to the NKVD that the children were Jewish, not Crimean Tatar, and hence were allowed to stay in Crimea instead of being deported to the desert. The film debuted on 18 May 2017, the anniversary of the Sürgün. Originally the film was supposed to be filmed in Crimea, but after the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014 it was decided that the filming would be done in mainland Ukraine and Georgia.^[6]

Personal life

On 29 May 2018, he released a statement in support of Oleg Sentsov, a film director arrested in Russian-controlled Crimea. He is married to actress Ivanna Dyadyur, and has three children.^[3][7]

References