Lady Winsley

Lady Winsley, an American novelist, is assassinated on a small Turkish island. The well-known Inspector Fergan comes from Istanbul to lead the investigations. Almost immediately he has to deal with well-kept secrets in this far corner of the country where taboos are rife, family ties close, ancestral traditions and ethnic diversity broader than minds are.

“I wanted to tackle, head on, the question of adultery in a conservative society like the Middle East. The unfaithful wife is systematically considered as guilty whereas it’s the opposite for men... this is one of the consequences of a patriarchal system which is taken for granted. All the same, I didn’t want to turn it into a sociological analysis. The prisms of the detective novel and comedy were therefore perfectly in keeping with my basic intentions... Today I have made about ten films and I find myself in Dante Alighieri’s limbo: a Kurdish producer, or French or else Kurdish-French, no one really knows. Let’s just say that I love Europe and that I adhere freely to western civilisation. My home is in France, my heart is in Kurdistan and in my head, it’s my country.” Hiner Salem