Turkish Canadian Cultural Association

Winner of Palme d'Or 1982 Cannes Film Festival, “Yol” tells the distinct sad story of five convicts on furlough in Turkey.

Güney wanted Yol to savagely skewer many of Turkey's antiquated sociopolitical attitudes, notably the subjugation of women. Forced to direct the film by proxy while still imprisoned (Serif Gören merely followed instructions).

First convict Seyit Ali travels to his house and finds that his wife who was caught on betrayal by her family is held captive for him to end her life in an honor killing. This story tells the dramatic failure of Seyit Ali.

Second Convict Mehmet Salih must tell her wife Emine that he abandoned his brother-in-law during the heist. They decide to run away and get on a train but cant hide from another member of the Emine`s family and the story tells their dramatic failure.

Each prisoner in the film suffers from a conflict that threatens his freedom, with tradition also imprisoning him.

Awards Won;

• 1982 Cannes Film Festival, won FIPRESCI Prize
• 1982 Cannes Film Festival, won Palme d'Or
• 1982 Cannes Film Festival, won Prize of the Ecumenical Jury
• 1983 César Awards, nominated for César
• 1983 French Syndicate of Cinema Critics, won Critics Award
• 1983 Golden Globes, nominated for Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film
• 1984 London Critics Circle Film Awards, won ALFS Award

A black and white Turkish drama film about an illiterate horse cab driver, with two exhausted, half-dead horses. The family tries to survive in a damp and dingy living-quarters. Main character “Cabbar” performed by Yilmaz Guney himself does not have a good run of business. He is indebted almost to everyone. After losing one of his horses in a car accident, began starving, and struggling to support his family with five children.

When his last hope of winning the lottery fails, he bounds his hope to a preacher and searches for the treasure becomes a victim of empty promises and he looses his sane.

Güney wanted Umut to be a film showing the defects and contradictions of a reality without any actualization of a revolution and the illness of the socio-economic system of its time. Umut has a reputation for being the archetype of the revolutionist cinema and neo-realismo stream in Turkey. The film has been compared to films of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini. A lot of foreign, as well as national, cinema critics wrote about Güney’s Umut in comparison to Ladri di Biciclette by De Sica and Zavattini, an Italian production shot in 1948, which captured the Oscar prize in 1950 and is an important example of the Italian neo-realismo stream.

The film finished with an interesting and striking scene. Cabbar, who left his wife, children, and mother desperate in the cause of treasure search, opens his hands to a God, whom he does not know; he begins to turn around in the middle of arid lands. He has gone mad.

Awards Won

• Best film, 2nd Adana Golden Boll Film Festival, 1970
• Best director, 2nd Adana Golden Boll Film Festival, 1970
• Best scenario, 2nd Adana Golden Boll Film Festival, 1970
• Best actor, 2nd Adana Golden Boll Film Festival, 1970
• Best photography (Kaya Ererez), 2nd Adana Golden Boll Film Festival, 1970
• Best actor, Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival
• Selectors' Commission Special Prize, Grenoble Film Festival

Zavallılar is a film with 3 protagonists: Abuzer, Arap, and Hacı . The “wretches” are people crushed, looked down, excluded by the society, they are the real miserables. The film begins with the anxiety of the protagonists about their coming out.

Three friends beg to stay at the jail until spring, because they do not have anyone or any place to which they belong to. The film shows retrospectively the facts that caused them to go behind bars. While telling their story, Yılmaz Güney touch sore-spots of the society, and refer to certain deviating situations.

Six-year-old Yusuf has started primary school and is learning how to read and write, although he’s not doing particularly well at it. His best friend is his father, Yakup, who makes his living as a honey-gatherer. One morning, Yusuf tells his father about a dream he had the previous night – a dream that he insists must be a secret that they share with no-one else.

Later that same day, Yusuf stutters while reading aloud and is ridiculed by his classmates. He slips into silence, which distresses his mother, but she doesn’t know how to help him. Yakup is away, searching far into the forest for the bees that have mysteriously disappeared, so Yusuf’s mom sends Yusuf to spend Mirac Night (the sacred night of the Ascension of the Prophet) with his grandmother, who lives far from their village. Upon hearing the story of the Mirac, Yusuf is inspired to search for his father deep in the forest. Will the dream that he shared with his father come true?

After 10 years in prison for anti-government activities, Yusuf returns to his village near the Black Sea. His mother is not well, his father died while he was in prison, and his sister and most of his friends have moved away. His old buddy Mikail is about the only person he can spend time with. As autumn slowly gives way to winter, Yusuf and Mikail go to a tavern where Yusuf meets Eka, a beautiful Georgian prostitute. To Yusuf, Eka represents a final chance to elude his loneliness. To Eka, Yusuf is a strange and solitary soul, like a character from a Russian novel. Despite their attraction, timing and circumstances conspire against these two people from dramatically different worlds.

With the 1990s as a backdrop, Sonbahar goes beyond its theme of impossible love to examine a slice of recent Turkish history, quietly exposing the ironies and realities of the period.

Can a boy of nine be a big brother, a father, a mother and a luminary all at once? For young Ayşe, the answer is yes. In fact, as far as she’s concerned, her big brother Ahmet is afraid of nothing at all. But the truth is, Ahmet is a child too; and he too has his fears. Equally, it’s impossible for him to know everything.

Their father Kazım has gone off to marry another woman and abandoned the two children to their fate with Hasan, their elderly and half-crippled grandfather. But in spite of everything, brother and sister never seem to lose hope.

Set in a small village in Anatolia, this simple, poignant tale portrays the gritty realities of rural poverty, and the soaring power of the love between between a brother and sister.

Istanbul is a rare city, where great ancient cultures still affect the lives of modern citizens, and where religious life co-exists with secular society. Wrong Rosary follows a love story that could only take place in a city like Istanbul.

Musa, a young muezzin (the man who calls the faithful to prayer at a mosque) finds himself drawn to Clara, who lives in his apartment building and who, crucially, is a Catholic nun. Musa also meets an antiquarian bookseller, Yakup, who has a connection to Clara. As the lives of these three people intersect, director Mahmut Fazıl Coşkun plays down the melodrama and emphasizes the depth of the relationships that the characters have with each other, and with the intriguing city of Istanbul itself.