Single-channel video installation, color, sound
180 min
Produced by The Institute for the Readjustment of Clocks, Istanbul


The title of Kutlug Ataman’s film Never My Soul is taken from a cliché phrase that the "good-Turkish-girl" character says to her rapist in several old Turkish films – “You can have my body but never my soul!” The protagonist of Ataman’s film is a transsexual posing as Türkan Şoray, the real-life super diva of the Turkish Cinema. The transsexual's true life is similar to the melodramatic plot of a Türkan Şoray movie. Born a boy, she was beaten up by her military father throughout her childhood for displaying “effeminate” behaviour, taken to psychiatrists at the age of thirteen to ‘cure’ her of her sexual “deviance,” and later beaten and tortured by a notorious Istanbul police chief. Now living in Lausanne, her kidneys have failed and she is on dialysis. She has to make her living through prostitution.

Never My Soul emulates both documentary and fiction, yet evades definite classification. The roles and positions involved in film-making are deliberately shifted and parallaxed to such a degree that the work itself becomes a transvestite of sorts. The story is told in a blunt and confrontational manner, whilst mimicking the style of a classical Turkish melodrama.
 

Kutluğ Ataman (born 1961) is a Turkish contemporary artist and filmmaker, who produces both photography and video art. He won the Carnegie Prize for his works "Kuba" in 2004.. In the same year he was nominated for Turner Prize for his work "twelve". Kutlug Ataman was the jury for Istanbul Film Festival. His movies won many awards.

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