Never My Soul!

Ruhuma Asla

"Never My Soul" is a phrase taken from the cliché sentence the good-Turkish-girl character would say to her rapist in classic Turkish movies – "You can have my body but never my soul!" The film has at its center a transsexual who is pretending to be Turkan Soray, the real-life super diva of the Turkish Cinema, and her real life is similar to the melodramatic plot of a Turkan Soray movie. She was born as a boy, beaten up by her military father all throughout her childhood for exhibiting "effeminate" behavior, taken to psychiatrists at the age of thirteen to cure her sexual "deviance," then beaten up and tortured by an infamous Istanbul police chief. Now living in Lausanne, her kidneys have failed, she is on dialysis, and she has to live off of prostitution.