Never My Soul
Never My Soul is a film within a film, the life story of Ceyhan Firat told through her identification with the great melodrama star Turkan Soray and her many films. In Never my Soul the initial focus is on the (pre-operation) transsexual Ceyhan Firat.
Ceyhan Firat was born as a boy. During her childhood she was beaten by her father, a military man, because of her 'effeminate behaviour'. At the age of thirteen she was sent to the psychiatrist to 'cure' her of her 'sexual aberration'. Later she was beaten and tortured by an infamous police chief in Istanbul. She now lives in Lausanne, suffers from renal insufficiency and has to have dialysis as a result of the maltreatment. She has to prostitute herself in order to survive. She puts herself in the shoes of Turkan Soray, the super diva of the Turkish film scene, her great role model, and speaks various of her lines from films in order to complete her own narrative.
Never my soul was made in two takes. First the woman told her story that was filmed and put into writing. Then she learned the text by heart and a second version was filmed. Together these function like a film script that blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. These two versions were edited into the final work.
