Ivan Vladimirovich Dykhovichny, actor, scriptwriter and director, was born on October 16, 1947. He died of cancer on September 27, 2009, aged 61

Ivan Dykhovichny successfully navigated post-perestroika Russian cinema, and though his films were generally most popular at home, he had international success with Moscow Parade.

The Dykhovichny family — headed by Vladimir, a playwright and song-writer, and ballerina Alexandra Sinani — counted among their friends Boris Pasternak and Vladimir Vysotsky, who later dedicated a poem to Ivan. After his father’s death in 1963 Dykhovichny took a series of menial jobs in the course of which he met Alexander Kaidanovsky, the future star of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. In 1969 they both graduated from the Shchukin Theatre School.

A year later Dykhanovsky began 11 years at the Taganka Theatre and television work. He won a prize at the Krakow Short Film Festival in the mid-Eighties and in 1988 came his first feature, an adaptation of Chekhov’s The Black Monk. Recognition in France led to TV work there, before an international co-production became his greatest success.

Known internationally as Moscow Parade (1992), the Russian title Prorva (The Chasm) better reflects the setting of 1930s Moscow, teetering on the edge of the Terror. Vadim Yusov’s garishly saturated photography heightened the grotesque atmosphere and the cast included Ute Lemper, playing a former aristocrat married to a member of the NKVD.

Further recognition came at Cannes with Muzyka dlya Dekabrya (Music for December, 1995) and Dykhovichny then turned to television presenting and from 1999-2000 headed up the Russia TV channel. He made more films in 2002 and 2006, and his last completed film, Evrop-Aziya (Europe-Asia, 2008), was a labyrinthine absurdist comedy. He was planning a film about Mayakovsky’s ménage-à-trois with the Briks, but work was cut short by cancer.

Dykhovichny married three times, coincidentally to three Olgas, and had a son with each of the first two.

Halit Refig, film director, was born on March 5, 1934. He died on October 11, 2009, aged 75

Halit Refig was a leading Turkish film director whose work reflected a country torn between tradition and modernity, Islam and the West. Born in Izmir, he studied engineering at Robert College, Istanbul, before military service in Korea, Japan and Ceylon. While abroad, he made amateur 8mm documentaries; on returning to Turkey, he wrote film criticism before entering the film industry as an assistant director and screenwriter. In 1960 he made his directorial debut with Forbidden Love.

Refig was committed to developing a specifically Turkish national cinema. His work revealed the social concern typifying some of the best Turkish films of the 1960s. The powerful Birds of Exile (1964), about the trials of a country family that moves to Istanbul, won Refig the first of three Best Director awards at the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival.

Also well received were Broken Lives (1965), Four Women in the Harem (1965), which Refig co-scripted with respected novelist Kemal Tahir, and I Gave My Heart to a Turk (1969), about the love between a Turkish man and a foreign woman. From the Seventies, Refig also directed for television.

In 1979 he made Tired Warrior, based on a Tahir novel set at the time of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of modern Turkey. This controversial film was banned by the military Government in 1982 and the negative destroyed; only a decade later was it screened from a video copy. Nevertheless, Refig continued to work: The Flame (1984) was a big commercial hit, while Madame (1988) and Women’s Ward (1989) earned critical acclaim. He directed his last feature, Island of Dogs, in 1997.