Word: ney
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Screenplay by Yilmaz Güney...
Yilmaz Güney is a national movie idol, a world-class moviemaker and a convicted murderer. There are many, in Turkey and in the international film community, who believe that these three eminences are related. Güney is a firebrand of his country's intellectual left. His films-slow, ruminative, defiantly indigenous-smolder with an ideologue's indignation and a poet's ironic compassion. For these heresies and others, Güney has spent half of his adult life in prison. In 1974, while filming a scene in a crowded restaurant in Adana...
...ney is describing a milieu as familiar to him as the inside of a movie studio is to most Hollywood directors: a Turkish prison. This is not the glossy torture chamber of Midnight Express-no theatrical sadomasochism here, no melodramatizing of the color scheme, no soft-focus sexual groping-but a place where ordinary men endure the restless boredom of confinement. Five of them are given a week's pass to visit their families, and find that the same restrictions face them and their women on the outside. The country is a prison, every liberating impulse is indictable...
...ney "directed" Yol while in prison, smuggling sketches and instructions for each shot of his screenplay to Şerif Gören, his assistant, who then realized Güney's film plan. Perhaps because of this long-distance arrangement, Yol possesses a clarity of imagery and an editorial crispness not evident in Güney's other films. It is dour but never dull; it proceeds with an assurance born of passion and technical expertise. The picture may thus serve as the announcement of an adroit new director in Gören, a canny marshaler of film...
...caustic observer put it, "The film couldn't miss in Cannes: it was both American and anti-American." As for Yol, this slow, powerful study of six Turkish prisoners on a short leave to visit their families was "directed" by its author, Yilmaz Güney, while he was being held in a Turkish jail on a murder charge that his supporters believe was politically motivated...