Noted Turkish director Yilmaz Guney died in September at the age of 47. Yol, which won the Palme d'Or at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, was Guney's first film to reach a wide audience in the U.S. Guney conceived and wrote the script for Yol while a political prisoner, supervising the direction by his longtime associate, Serif Goren, from his prison cell. He edited the film in Europe after escaping Turkey during his prisoner's leave. Guney reported that he solicited stories from hundreds of inmates in order to write the script: “Apart from one or two details,” he said, “all the events depicted in this film are taken from life, and the characters are actual friends of mine.”
Yol is lushly photographed and handsomely edited to connect the separate stories of five characters; but its effect is of the most brutal and searing of political exposés, ultimately depicting Turkey as one large prison. The film follows the fates of five Kurdish prisoners who are set free by their military government captors for a week's leave, only to find life on the outside made more painful than ever by their long absence and brief return. What begins as a film entirely about men suddenly becomes a horrifying picture of the plight of Turkish women, as the men are expected to resume the primitive cruelty demanded by tribal codes from which they have long been absent. Though each succumbs in his own way, Yol is finally a film about a very brief moment in each man's life when he begins to think beyond the pecking order of oppression--political, religious, and sexual.