TIFF | The Hungry Wolves

Saturday February 4
07:00 PM
Details
Country: Turkey
Year: 1969
Language: Turkish
Runtime: 88 minutes
Rating: 14A
Principal Cast:
Director: Yilmaz Güney


Yilmaz Güney directs and stars in this ferociously exciting “Turkish western” set in the blinding snows of the eastern mountains, where a laconic hired killer finds himself both hunter and hunted.


Notes


Beautifully shot in black and white that intensifies the blinding snowscape in which the film is set, the Leone-like Hungry Wolves stars Güney as Memed, a laconic fugitive who hunts bandits in the mountains of eastern Turkey. When a rich landowner hires Memed as a bounty killer to avenge his father's death, the hired gun finds himself both hunter and hunted, having to elude or kill the "hungry wolves" of the title. The harshness of the snowbound landscape is equalled by that of its people: one woman is informed to find another husband quickly as hers will soon be dead; another begs Memed to shoot her as he has so many others, but he refuses because she can't pay him for the job ("I don't fire a bullet for free," he informs the desperate peasant). With a stirring, Ennio Morricone-like music score, the tremendously exciting Hungry Wolves introduces the figure of the solitary or isolated man that would be a fixture of Güney's cinema.

Film Notes from Harvard Film Archive | The Hungry Wolves

The Hungry Wolves (Aç kurtlar)
Directed by Yilmaz Güney. With Yilmaz Güney, Sevgi Can, Hayati Hamzaoglu
Turkey 1969, 35mm, b/w, 70 min. Turkish with English subtitles

Both hunter and hunted, a bandit (Güney) lives in a desolate snowscape, beautifully captured in stark black-and-white cinematography. Seemingly invincible, the bandit becomes increasingly desperate to protect his family from his enemies. The film’s emotive musical score recalls Ennio Morricone as surely as the film’s tale of revenge recalls Sergio Leone. Indeed, the stoic, tight-lipped determination of Güney’s bandit seems modeled after Clint Eastwood. Güney stages his lone figures in a landscape made almost abstract by the blinding white of the snow, giving the film a bleak poetry. The solitude of the hero of The Hungry Wolves will increasingly be seen in Güney’s future films as not so much heroic as doomed.