Born in Los Angeles, Leslie became a traveler at the age of one. First, her US Air Force father moved her and her family all over America, and then all over the world.

It was while she was in Rome that she began her career in the arts, first in music and theatre. After a couple of years there, she moved to writing and the production side of entertainment in San Diego after getting a degree in Marketing and English Literature from San Diego State.

But not until 1985, after she received her JD from Lincoln Law School did she move to Turkey – To Diyarbakir as a civilian contract specialist for the American government. Over her 15 years in Turkey, she taught English and contract law (of course), represented American companies in the military market, and . . . repaired helicopters for the Turkish Army! She also worked as a legal and technical consultant for several Turkish and American companies, including Etap Holding (previously Coca Cola Turkey) of Izmir and Allied Signal of New Jersey.

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Born and raised in Türkiye, Ertuğ Tüfekçioğlu moved to Los Angeles to pursue film. Ertuğ participated in various independent projects primarily produced and shot in California. Following a break to study in Italy, he returned to Los Angeles to complete the
production program at USC.

His student film Zarpa!was screened in Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Since 2004, he has been volunteering as the moderator of the TurksInEntertainment Alliance, which exists to connect Turks to each other and to their foreign colleagues in the entertainment industries of the world. He is fluent in three languages and serves as the head of project development at Califa Productions, LLC . In addition to overseeing development, Ertuğ continues his directorial pursuits with the company.

His latest works include:

the short film Well Sooted aka Gönlümün İsi

• 6. Uluslararası İzmir Kısa Filim Festivali
• ION International Animation Games And Film Festival
• Hisar Kısa Seçkisi
• 25. Uluslararası İstanbul Filim Festivali
• 1st Annual Cross Cultural Film Festival
• 4th Annual Queens International Film Festival

and the feature documentary Ya Tutarsa? aka What If It Could Happen?

• 6. Uluslararası İzmir Kısa Filim Festivali
• 11. Türkiye/Almanya Filim Festivali
• İZ TV - Türkiye

Born in Ankara 1970.
Lives and works in Istanbul (TR)
1992/95 Marmara University The Faculty of Fine Arts, Post Graduate, Istanbul (TR)
1988/92 Marmara University The Faculty of Fine Arts, Istanbul (TR)

Below article is from: frieze.com
Esra Ersen’s practice lies in a peculiar area somewhere between David Attenborough and Nikki S. Lee. It’s not quite straight documentary, but nor is it stealth shooting. Ersen, who was born and raised in Turkey, performs an ambiguous dance between the two, embedding herself in specific contexts, breaking down the barriers between observer and observed, in order to make candid documentary films that explore, together with photo and text pieces, the associations and expectations of identity, stereotype and prejudice.

The show is the first under the Frankfurter Kunstverein’s new leadership of curator Chus Martinez and is a promising beginning. She came up with an original way of unifying the space while also tackling a video show’s most problematic aspect: sound crossover. Thick dividing walls constructed from layers of brown cardboard efficiently absorbed any noise bleed while also commenting on the work: for an artistic practice based on research into social stereotyping the material communicated the idea of what we are sold and what we buy, not in the sense of shopping but of acceptance and belief.

Ersen has lived peripatetically, working in a variety of countries, such as Sweden, Austria, the UK and Germany. In each location she has attempted to identify and address a specific social problem. While the individual works accentuate the particularities of a given country, seeing them alongside one another also raises questions as to whether the countries are indeed so different. The works Hamam (2001) and Which One You Choose (2003), for example, confront gender stereotyping in very specific contexts – Turkey and Japan – yet reveal the global problem facing women of being shoehorned into certain roles expected of them from the societies in which they live. If You Could Speak Swedish (2001) follows the travails of immigrants to Sweden, mainly from the Middle East, while Brothers & Sisters (2003) focuses on the plight of Africans in Turkey. Watching them side by side, a hideously ironic parallel is drawn in terms of colour prejudice: while fair-skinned Germans may look down on the relatively swarthy Turkish immigrants, back home in Turkey the locals dish it out in spades to the darker-skinned Africans. While interesting issues are raised, each of these earlier works is a bit of a one-trick pony, not digging quite deep enough to offer the viewer more than a slice of life.

More recent work, however, is more complex, such as the text series Testimony (2003), which was produced for an art space located near a prison in Graz. While news and information about life on the outside filters inward, Ersen challenged the world’s disregard for the inmates’ life by interviewing them and printing their testimonies on large yellow tarpaulins hung around the perimeter walls. Passers-by could muse on such comments as ‘Are you sure that this wall between us is really necessary?’ or ‘Alien, unknown, exotic. UTOPIAN. Your world makes me anxious. How do you feel about mine?’

Also successful were the two works from 2005. The first, Parachutist on the Third Floor, Birds in the Laundry, is a three-channel video installation studying life in council accommodation in Malmö. Ersen first accesses the tower block through young children, who give her a guided tour of murals painted in the 1990s, based on the resident immigrants’ memories of their homelands yet painted using romantic Swedish imagery; on the next screen we follow another artist (hired by Ersen) as she paints new murals based on the stories being told on the third screen by the current residents about their disappointments, realities and hopes. Set alongside one another, the three screens offer a simultaneous view of past, present and future, blending the different stories into a touching portrait of immigrant life, the efforts to adapt and the pressure to do so.

The title of the other work from 2005, Ich bin Türke, ich bin ehrlich, ich bin fleißig (I am Turkish, I am Honest, I am Diligent), comes from the words of a Turkish school song. Here Ersen asked a group of Austrian children to wear, for a week, the traditional Turkish school uniform and to record their feelings about it. The video – which follows the children to class and on a field trip, where they are stared at in their strange attire – is placed in a niche above a rail that holds all 21 uniforms. On these the wearers’ silk-screened handwriting records their daily impressions, such as: ‘Monday: I don’t feel so good in the uniform.’ Taken as a whole, the work attempts to examine how ideological concepts may be transferred, such as nationality, power and identification.

In these later pieces Ersen has clearly expanded and deepened her practice, adding more layers to it and thus taking the essential step that elevates it from straight documentary to successful art work and which makes her work both challenging and promising.

Amanda Coulson

Born in Isparta in 1964, Zeki Demirkubuz is a contemporary Turkish film director, screenwriter and producer.He was inprisoned for three years at the age of 17 for alleged communist activities. On his release, he became involved with movie making. After working as an assistant director, he established his own production company Mavi Film. Uncompromising and fiercely independent, Demirkubuz controls almost every aspect of his films, making few concessions to prevailing trends.

Though grounded in the hubbub of city life, the films of Turkish director Zeki Demirkubuz unfold on a more metaphysical plane populated by the living dead and the dearly departed. Cramped urbanity offers lost souls anonymity but denies privacy, and Demirkubuz rations the glimmers of hope. If his obsession with the cosmic friction of quotidian life recalls Kieslowski, his absurdist, often diabolical tendencies suggest Beckettian farce as realized by the Coen brothers.

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One of the rising stars of the New Turkish-German Cinema, Neco Çelik follows in the footsteps of contemporary masters such as Fatih Akin (Head-On), producing provocative work which reflects on the lives of Turkish immigrants living in Germany. Çelik’s work is distinguished in its focus on youth culture, giving voice to figures not typically seen in contemporary European cinema.

Neco Çelik was born in 1972 in Kreuzberg, Berlin. The district of Kreuzberg is known as Little Istanbul for its large concentration of Turkish immigrants and their German-born families. He was born in the neighborhood when the wall still divided the city and when Kreuzberg was an isolated corner in West Berlin, squeezed along a far circumference of the wall where “guest workers” from Turkey, like Mr. Çelik’s parents, found places to live. Their children, Mr. Çelik and his four brothers and sisters, grew up speaking German in school and Turkish at home. But school was effectively segregated. Almost all of Mr. Çelik’s fellow students were of Turkish origin.In his youth, before going into film directing and teaching media, Çelik belonged to a gang who called themselves “36er”, corresponding to the postal address of Berlin 36 at the time.

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Mennan Yapo (Mennan Yapicioglu) was born in 1966 in Munich to Turkish parents. Since 1995, Yapo has written several screenplays in German as well as in English; he produced three short films as an executive producer and has appeared as a supporting actor in Peter Greenaway’s “The Pillow Book” (1996) and Wolfgang Becker’s “Good Bye, Lenin!” (2003). Yapo’s first directing project, the short film “Framed”, was supported by the FilmFernsehFond Bayern and the Filmstiftung NRW.

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