YOL Movie Review

The Way

Five Turkish political prisoners are released from their minimum-security prison for one week, to visit their families. Before long, they almost come to wish they had stayed in jail. Disasters of every stripe flood into the lives of these men, and most—like the man who finds that his wife was locked out of their house by his family because she had an affair while he was in jail—are presented as a part of the natural social order of a country so oppressively patriarchal that it has in effect gone quite mad. The writer and credited co-director of the film, Yilmaz Güney, designed the film while himself in prison on political charges; an associate, Serif Gören, did the actual directing of the film based on Güney's instructions. The brutal and ferociously angry Yol is nothing if not a testament to artistic dedication and determination. That did not go unnoticed at Cannes, where Yol split the 1982 Grand Prize with another overtly political work of fiction, Costa-Gavras's Missing.

NEXT STOP … Before the Rain, Commissar, The Silences of the Palace

1982 (PG) 126m/C TU Tarik Akan, Serif Sezer; D: Yilmaz Guney, Serif Goren; W: Yilmaz Guney; M: Sebastian Argol. Cannes Film Festival ‘82: Best Film. VHS COL, AUD