Mémoire de l'Avenir

Sedef Ecer - Rights reserved

Born in Istanbul, Sedef Ecer grew up in the world of movie-making, theatre and television.

As an actress, she played in 25 feature films and several plays since she is three years old and has worked recently under the directions of Amos Gitaï (with Jeanne Moreau), Bruno Freyssinet, Lorenzo Gabriel, Thomas Bellorini, Françoise Merle, Joëlle Cattino.

As a writer and actress, she has been a nominee or a recipient of prestigious awards. She writes different genres and in two languages: as a journalist for the Turkish press, she has written more than 500 articles or opinion pieces for national newspapers or magazines. She has also written novels and explored new genres with transmedia stories, the publication of her “email correspondance” or “micro-fictions”. She has written screenplays and translated Montaigne, Charlotte Delbo or Saint-Exupery’s works into Turkish.

But her major work is in the field of theater.

Her plays are published by Les Éditions de l'Amandier, Les Éditions l'Espace d'un Instant, Lansman and l’Avant-Scène in France, and translated into Polish, Turkish, Armenian, German, Greek, English.

On February the 22nd and 23rd, Sedef Ecer will inaugurate the March program of Mémoire de l'Avenir, dedicated to Women, with its manifesto THE WOMAN OF THE FUTURE, to be held from March 2nd to the 30th, 2019.

Born in Istanbul, novelist, playwright and a screenwriter Sedef Ecer practices several forms of writing in Turkish and in French.

Sedef Ecer proposes through ISTANBULLYWOOD - a performativity work, created at the present time – looking to immerse us in the golden age of Turkish cinema, through three female figures: Three women, three generations of Turkish actresses. There is Djémilé, born in 1905, she was the first Muslim actress to dare to go on stage, at the beginning of the 20th century, in Constantinople. There is her daughter, Esra, born in 1935, who was the flamboyant star of the great years of the Turkish cinema. And there is the little girl Vâlâ, born in 1965, who was a child-star, and from the age of three she grew up on the plateaux of cinema and theatres. Vâla is the alter ego of Sedef Ecer, who herself, since the age of three, grew up on film sets, in Istanbul, turning twenty-five feature films, during a period of great freedom and creativity of the Turkish cinema.

Recently, Sedef Ecer immersed herself in her personal archives and discovered an intimate personal museum, by looking again at all those little girls she has interpreted, within different universes, that she has gone through, in all the costumes and names she has carried on. She also found out that from time to time she had associated movie’s scenes with memories of "real life."

She also discovered an Istanbul that is no longer exists, just like her childhood. Only one consolation: Her childhood as old Istanbul, both gone, yet both have been printed on the pellicle of the old films. She revisits this world of yesterday, mixes autobiographical elements with fiction, traveling in this "Istanbullywood" which produced for nearly 40 years thousands of actions, zombies, science fiction, terror, adventures, genre, musical movies, psychedelic, erotic or fairy tales movies …before the television signs his death penalty. Some of the copies are destroyed by the Army generals after the coup d'état of 1980.

PERFORMATIVE READING

February 22nd & 23rd - 8PM

Text excerpts - 40 min

Text and interpretation

SEDEF ECER

Interpretation and music

RICHARD DUBELSKI

Video

DEVRIM ALPÖGE

DISCUSSION after the performance

February 22nd - 9PM

Sedef Ecer and Mehmet Basutçu

Mehmet Basutçu is a film critic in-charge of the Turkish cinema retrospective organized by the Pompidou Center in 1996. From 2003 to 2018 Mehmet Basutçu was a Turkish film teacher at INALCO from 2003 to 2018.

Entrance 5€ / day

+ free glass of wine

Reservation is required for each of the dates

contact@memoire-a-venir.org

Istanbullywood

CREATION

IN PROGRESS BY

SEDEF ECER