Al-Bader Ben Yahya al-Hirsi, commonly known as Bader Ben Hirsi, (Arabic: بدر بن هرسي, born 1968) is an English playwright and director of Yemeni ancestry.
Hirsi's father, Yahya al-Hirsi al-Ban, was from the city of Lahij. Al-Ban moved from Yemen to Britain in the 1960s, and it was in that country that Bader Ben Hirsi was born and raised, along with six brothers and seven sisters.[1] Hirsi received a degree in business from the University of Buckingham, and worked in London as an investment banker for several years. However, he decided to move into drama, and received a degree in drama production from Goldsmiths College, part of the University of London.[1] Three of his plays, A Boring Affair, Claptrap, and On the Side of the Angels, were performed at the Edinburgh FringeinEdinburgh, Scotland.[1]
One of his sisters married Prince Muhammad al-Badr as his third wife.[citation needed]
In 1995, Hirsi visited Yemen for the first time, and in 1996, he married a native Yemeni woman. In 1998 he had his first daughter, Thea and two years later another daughter, Lana, then a son, Xane in 2004.[1] In 2000, Hirsi released the documentary The English Sheikh and the Yemeni Gentleman,[2] which he directed and produced with the help of British expatriate Tim Mackintosh-Smith.[1]
In 2005, he released A New Day in Old Sana'a (a romantic drama shot in San‘a’, the capital), which became the first feature-length film to be shot in Yemen[3] and the first Yemeni film to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival.[3][4] Hirsi himself had a cameo as a djinni at the end of the film.[5] After the film won the award for best Arabic film at the Cairo International Film Festival, Egypt's Ministry of Culture presented him with an award of £E100,000 for "his role in promoting Arabic films."[6]
