Discover Top Posts Tagged with #yilmaz guney

Umut, Yılmaz Güney, 1970

#hope #umut #yılmaz güney #yilmaz güney #yilmaz guney

Yılmaz Güney was a Zazaki Kurdish film director, screenwriter, novelist, and actor. He quickly rose to prominence in the Turkish film industry. Many of his works were devoted to the plight of ordinary working-class people in Turkey. He was at constant odds with the Turkish government over the portrayal of Kurdish culture, people and language in his movies.

He won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982 for the film Yol (The Road) which made it the first Turkish film that won the Golden Palm.

Its screenplay was written by Yılmaz Güney, and it was directed by his assistant Şerif Gören, as Güney was in prison at the time. Later, after Güney escaped from Imrali prison, he took the negatives of the film to Switzerland and later edited it in Paris.

The film was banned in Turkey until 1999 because of its negative portrayal of Turkey at the time, which was under the control of a military dictatorship. Even more controversial was the limited use of the Kurdish language, music and culture (which were forbidden in Turkey at the time), as well as the portrayal of the hardships Kurds live through in Turkey. One scene in the movie even calls the location of Ömer's village "Kurdistan".

A new version of Yol was released in 2017, called Yol: The Full Version in which many of these controversial parts and scenes have been taken out, to make the film suitable for release in Turkey. In order to be shown at the Turkish stand at Cannes 2017 the Kurdistan insert was removed. In what critics say goes against the director Yılmaz Güney's wishes and call "censorship", the frame showing "Kurdistan" as well as a highly political scene where Ömer speaks about difficulties of being Kurdish were removed.