Lincoln Film | Guney Screenings

Lincoln Film | Guney Series Part 1 | Intro for Elegy Lincoln Film | Guney Series Part 2 | Elegy Q&A Lincoln Film | Guney Series Part 3 | Intro for Yol

Hope | Lincoln Center

HOPE
UMUT | YILMAZ GÜNEY, 1970
TURKEY | FORMAT: 35MM | 100 MINUTES


With Hope, Yılmaz Güney—already a popular screen actor—became a major director as well, blending together several of the richest currents in Turkey’s socially engaged cinema into a work that remains as powerful today as when first screened. Cabbar (played by Güney himself) supports his family by driving a broken-down horse-drawn wagon, but competition from taxis threatens to put him out of business. At wit’s end, Cabbar starts to search for a hidden treasure with the aid of a hodja, a mystic. Despite Cabbar’s frequent laments about the hand of fate that seems to rule his life, Güney is always careful to point out the very human causes behind his apparent destiny. Hope was banned in Turkey, but a copy was smuggled out to the Cannes Film Festival, where it caused a sensation; the official ban on the film would remain in effect on the film for almost twenty years.


SERIES: THE SPACE BETWEEN: A PANORAMA OF CINEMA IN TURKEY
VENUE: WALTER READE THEATER

Yol | Lincoln Center

YOL
ŞERIF GÖREN, 1982
TURKEY/SWITZERLAND/FRANCE | TURKISH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES | FORMAT: 35MM | 111 MINUTES
Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, this most famous of all Turkish films starts in a prison, where those prisoners who have served at least a third of their time are given a week’s furlough to go home. Yet, as the film makes shockingly clear, going outside the prison walls doesn’t necessarily end one’s personal incarceration. Directed from a highly detailed screenplay by Yılmaz Güney (who was in jail at the time) by his close collaborator Şerif Gören, Yol renders each of its five principal stories with sympathy and clarity, creating a vibrant, visceral sense of prisoners’ world, while offering insights into their dreams and fears.  Rarely has a film so effectively communicated an atmosphere defined by daily oppression, yet Yol is not without hope: grave as their family or romantic problems might be, each prisoner knows they must be addressed squarely.


SERIES: THE SPACE BETWEEN: A PANORAMA OF CINEMA IN TURKEY
VENUE: WALTER READE THEATER

Elegy | Lincoln Center

ELEGY
AĞIT | YILMAZ GÜNEY, 1971
TURKEY | FORMAT: 35MM | 80 MINUTES
Turkish cinema scholar Erju Ackman in person at the May 4 screening to discuss the work of Yılmaz Güney!


In this return to territory explored in earlier films such as Law of the Border, Yılmaz Güney—again working as director, writer and lead actor—offers a tale about smugglers working in southeastern Turkey. Çobanoǧlu is a former peasant who took to smuggling in order to survive, made notorious by his success in eluding capture. The locals compete with each other to give information on Çobanoǧlu to the authorities for a price, while the landowners aren’t above hiring him for some of their own dirty work. Yet through it all, Çobanoǧlu keeps his dignity, convinced there must be some way out of this vicious cycle of corruption. Once again, Güney creates a powerful portrait of a society feeding on itself, destroying its own possibilities for reform or improvement. The use of landscapes recalls the look and work of Peckinpah,  whose own, similarly themed The Wild Bunch had just been released.


SERIES: THE SPACE BETWEEN: A PANORAMA OF CINEMA IN TURKEY
VENUE: WALTER READE THEATER