Yilmaz Güney - Serif Gören - Yol (aka The Road) (1982)

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Yol (1982)
DVD rip | 110 min | XviD 720x528 | 1621 kb/s | 448 kb/s AC3 | 25 fps | 1.58 GB + 3% recovery
Turkish | Subtitles: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Russian .srt | Genre: Drama | MU/RS

The story is a powerful and fascinating tale of several prisoners on temporary leave from a prison, and the crucial events that they face. Tragedy and sadness are prevalent, despite the fact that each character's leave has a very different outcome, and the film excellently and compellingly explores how the characters must face their difficult circumstances. It addresses a wide range of forces, political, social, familial, that impact the lives of the characters, and comments on all of these. The film's exploration of these issues ranges from blunt and harsh, to subtle and satirical and the actors are simply fabulous.

Realized on film by Yilmaz Güney's assistant director Serif Gören based on the screenplay by - and technical direction of - imprisoned political prisoner, author, actor, and filmmaker Güney, Yol is an elegantly spare, haunting, and socially relevant portrait of repression, tyranny, isolation, and inhumanity. By juxtaposing images of transnational public transportation (in particular, trains and rural buses) and varied landscape that characterize the disparate paths of the furloughed prisoners, Güney illustrates, not only the country's innate cultural and ethnographic diversity, but more importantly, the universality of oppression.

Moreover, through repeated episodes of martial law curfews, random check points and inspections, and civilian searches, Güney draws an implicit parallel in the paradoxical status of the conditionally liberated prisoners with the broader depiction of curtailed personal freedom among the general population under the nation's military rule. Inevitably, the sad, often tragic plight of the prisoners' elusive search for a sense of normalcy serves, not only as a microcosmic representation of life under political instability and a repressive regime, but also as a distilled and elementally human contemporary document of desolation, struggle, compassion, and perseverance.

Güney’s approach to his topic goes way beyond simplistic finger-pointing however. It goes without saying that a leftist like Güney is going to be critical of the repressive government and military elements in Turkey, but, surprisingly, Güney saves his most scathing attacks for some of the more archaic values and traditions of the people of Turkey. He places a great deal of the blame on the nature of the society and its belief systems. This is a society that badly mistreats its women. Even though this film is composed of five nearly independent storylines, they add to each other’s strength by their interactions.
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