Yol

Five political prisoners are given one week’s reprieve to go and visit their families. One man returns to find that his adulterous wife is being kept prisoner by his father-in-law who expects him to kill her. Another returns to his village but cannot marry the woman he loves because custom decrees he must marry his widowed sister-in-law; another finds his family has shunned him for confessing to the authorities. As the men spread out across Turkey’s vast terrain, “Yol” explores the strictures of tradition on family and on marriage. The men, all of whom must return to their prison cells, are prisoners of an authoritarian state. Their women and their children are prisoners of an equally authoritarian patriarchy. Guney was himself a political prisoner, incarcerated for his intellectual activism against state militarism, when he wrote the script to “Yol”, which was smuggled out to Serif Goren, who directed the film for Guney. Guney escaped to Switzerland where he completed the film. Though the social, political and gender relationships explored in the film are harsh and unrelenting, what is transcendant about “Yol” is the deeply rigorous humanism that Guney and Goren extend to all their characters. That Guney and Goren were able to complete the film is a testament itself to their intelligence and dedication to a cinema of enlightenment. This film is one of cinema’s greatest laments against the violence of patriarchy and one of the great emancipist works about the possibilities of change and transformation. (Awards: Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Winner of the International Critic’s Prize) In Turkish with English subtitles.