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Seyyit Han 1968 - 75'
Umut 1970 - 100'
Endise 1974 - 75'
Sürü 1978 - 125'
Yol 1982 - 111'
Le Mur 1983 - 117'
Documentaries about Güney :
On l'appelait le Roi Laid Claude Weisz 1982 - 107'
Autour du Mur Patrick Blossier 1983 - 74'
 When one talks about cinema in Turkey and Kurdistan, Yilmaz Güney’s name is the first that comes to mind. The dazzling destiny of the son of Kurdish peasants who emigrated to Cilicia merges with that of the country’s cinematic history. His passion for cinema began at adolescence, when to help feed the family he worked for a while as a traveling film projectionist going around to the encampments of nomads with a makeshift projector. There he discovered the power of images and the tastes of his viewing public.
Nature endowed him with the physique of an “ordinary Anatolian peasant” while the first young blond men from Istanbul’s rich neighborhoods were the rage. With the force of his acting and his understanding of the peoples’ psychology, he was soon crowned the “ugly king” of Turkish cinema where he played the role of a sort of Robin Hood in some one hundred action films.
Towards the end of the sixties when social unrest was rocking Turkey, Güney went behind the camera in order to make his own films. Seyyit Han (Bride of the Earth, 1968), a sad love story, was an instant success. Aç Kurtlar (The Hungry Wolves, 1969) was hailed by critics as ushering in a new era in Turkish cinema. But it was really Umut (Hope, 1970) that introduced Gürney to European directors and confirmed his talents as a filmmaker. His neo-realistic films showed for the first time on the big screen Kurds, rural life, the little people working precarious jobs to get by and being crushed by a wild, conquering capitalism that was being unleashed upon them.
The success and social impact of the films Güney wrote, acted in and directed troubled the authorities. Accused of promoting communistic propaganda and separatism, Güney spent twelve years in Turkish prisons after the military coup of 1970. But even in prison he continued to write screenplays and have his assistants direct them. The Herd and The Way are masterpieces written and directed from behind prison walls, with a Shakespearean observation of Kurdish and Turkish society, political oppression, social archaism and the situation of women.
Given a prison sentence of more one hundred years by the Turkish military junta for his writings and films in 1980, Güney, for the first time in his life as an artist, was incapable of making films, even with the help of those on the outside. The military regime seized copies of his films that would eventually be destroyed, and his contact with the outside world was severed. After many attempts, he finally managed to escaped and turned up in France in 1981. He was granted political asylum and discretely devoted himself to editing the rushes of The Way that had secretly been smuggled out of Turkey. The film was screened at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival where he shared the Palme d’Or with Costa Gavras for Missing. It went on to be an international success.
A militant, revolutionary artist wanting to bear witness to his time, Güney refused to take the easy road or follow the trends of the time. He wanted to portray the “thousand and one faces” of suffering and of man’s passions. The Wall, shot in France showing the prison conditions in Turkey, was the fruit of this “obligation to bear witness”. The critics gave it mixed reviews mainly because of the violence of certain of the harsher scenes, which were nonetheless but a pale reflection of reality. Disappointed by its reception, depleted by an illness left untreated in prison, Güney died in Paris in September of 1984 at the age of 47, at the pinnacle of his art and leaving behind so many unmade films. The obituary in a Turkish newspaper read: “It’s the end of the movie!” but the legend of Gürney continues on.
Kendal Nezan
President of the Paris Kurdish Institute
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