My acquaintance with Nebahat Çehre coincides with the beginning of my cinematic journey.

Yılmaz Güney’s arrival in Osmaniye for the filming of Dağların Oğlu (1965) was instrumental in my meeting with both Güney and his co-star Nebahat Çehre. My collaborations with Yılmaz Güney established my acquaintance with her, who was one of Güney’s favorite actors (and wife) at the time, and it lead to a lifelong friendship. Her star has risen during the 1960s which is considered to be the golden age of our cinema. It was a time when actors were chosen by what scripts demanded and not the other way around. Her star-making turn at the beginning of her career in Metin Erksan’s Acı Hayat / Bitter Life in which she managed to match her beauty with her talent played a major part in her career trajectory which lead to her working with Yılmaz Güney, and established her as an essential actress in Turkish cinema. Unlike most actresses, she wasn’t confined in the template that the industry cast for her, and thus she was able to play many different characters in a wide spectrum. By playing every character from passive, innocent, fragile, sentimental women in melodramas, which was essentially the official genre of the Turkish cinema at the time, to warrior women in period films and comic book adaptations, to women trapped by traditions of semi-feudal relations, and ferocious females of fantastic films, she proved that she is an actress of every genre. -Abdurrahman Keskiner