I discovered Tülay German’s story as an ethnomusicology student when I was living in London with a CD that a friend brought from Istanbul. The booklet within told us about her life story and the CD was a spectrum of her diverse musical career. I spent a good few years with this CD and I read her autobiography when I moved back to Turkey. Both as a woman, as a political stance and of course musically, she moved me deeply.
I somehow managed to go to Paris and meet her. And after we started working together with Barış, we finished the film after two years.
During the filming process Tülay German always told me “My dear Didem, history always keeps us apart”. She wasn’t only talking about our age difference and that I was somehow ‘delayed’ to meet her. She was talking about how the historical events affected our todays and yesterdays. But for me, it was exactly for these reasons that this film was made.
Just as Mina Urgan says, I also thought “In order to avoid being a society without a past, I find it useful that everyone writes their memories’.
As a director, I found it utterly important to gather these memories that witnessed a historical period and share it with an audience.
For me this film, Tülay German’s life story, was an excuse to question history.
DİDEM PEKÜN
The first thing that attracted me to this film was the relationship between these two women; a ‘respectable lady’ and a director who had a feminine and delicate approach to her story. Two women from two generations that seemed to not know one another well. And us from that second generation unfortunately missed this voice. The historical events that affected Tülay German’s life are still resonating today in our collective experiences. Exile decisions taken by force due to political ideologies, faith in the collective and individual engagement, and eventually loss of collective memory...
Along with all these questions, to me, who spent the forst 30 years of his life in France, discovering this voice also meant facing my native country’s and my own past.
