The first film of the noted Turkish director Yilmaz Guney to reach a wide audience in the U.S., 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. In following the fates of five Kurdish prisoners who are given a week's leave to return to their villages, Yol appears at first to be a film entirely about men. Set free by their military government captors, the five spend a good portion of their leave in transit, only to find life on the outside made more painful than ever by their long absence and brief return. Then, suddenly and horrifyingly, Yol becomes a film about women, as the men are expected to resume the primitive cruelty toward their women 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.
Guney conceived and wrote the script for Yol while himself a political prisoner; he supervised the direction by his longtime associate, Serif Goren, from his prison cell. He edited the film in Europe after escaping Turkey during his own prisoner's leave. Guney reports that he solicited stories from hundreds of inmates in order to write the script. “Apart from one or two details,” he says, “all the events depicted in this film are taken from life, and the characters are actual friends of mine.” (JB)