Kurdish actor and film-maker Yilmaz Güney (1937–84) was prolific, despite being constantly in conflict with the Turkish regime as a result of his leftist sympathies for the subaltern poor and his highlighting of Kurdish issues (see e.g. wiki, and this review of his ouevre, both providing useful references).

Having admired his film Law of the border (1966—see Early Turkish verismo), I’ve been exploring his work a bit further. Hope (1970) was regarded as a Turkish equivalent of Bicycle thieves.

The theme of rural Kurdish blood-feuds continues in The herd (1978), but as Güney extended his sympathies to the plight of the urban poor, I’m struck by Zavallılar (“The fall”, 1974; literally “The poor”), the stories of three men fallen on hard times, driven to destitution by cruel fate. Here it is, alas without subtitles:

But most impressive of all is Yol (The road, 1982) directed by his assistant Şerif Gören while Güney was in prison. Jailed in 1972, soon after his release in 1974 he was sentenced again for shooting a judge to death. He managed to keep working on projects from prison, and after escaping in 1981 he took the negatives of Yol to Switzerland, editing it in Paris. The film was banned in Turkey until 1999.

His periods in captivity partly inspired the screenplay, which portrays the stories of five prisoners given a week’s home leave in the aftermath of the 1980 Turkish coup, travelling back to their troubled lives in rural south Anatolia to perform traumatic family duties. As this NYT review comments, the film portrays Turkey as one large prison, oppressed not only by political tyranny but also by superstition and bigotry. You can watch it without subtitles here, but it’s well worth buying the DVD: *

Güney’s final film Duvar (The wall, 1983)—recreating a Turkish prison in Paris (interview here)—again uses the metaphor of incarceration. It becomes progressively more involving, with a remarkable manifesto for Kurdistan in the riot near the end. This version is again without subtitles:

For more on Kurdish culture, see under my roundup of posts on west/central Asia.

* The effective soundtrack to Yol is by Zülfü Livaneli, who himself spent periods in jail before going into exile in 1984 (see e.g. his novel Serenade). His song Kardeşin Duymaz, pleading for Greek–Turkish coexistence, is heard at the climax of the TV series The Club.