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Yılmaz Güney

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“ We will win! We will surely win! „
~ Yılmaz Güney

Yılmaz Güney (April 1th, 1937 – September 9th, 1984) was a Kurdish film director, scenarist, novelist, and actor of Zaza Kurdish origin, who produced movies in Turkish. He quickly rose to prominence in Turkish Film Industry. Many of his works were devoted to the plight of ordinary, working class people in Turkey. Yılmaz Güney won the Palme d'Or with the film Yol he co-produced with Şerif Gören at Cannes Film Festival in 1982. He was at constant odds with the Turkish government because of his portrayals of Kurdish culture, people and language in his movies. After killing a judge in 1974 and being convicted, he fled the country and later lost his citizenship.

Güney, who entered the cinema in 1959, has many prison and exile sentences in his career, both for political crimes and murder. In 1961, following the 1960 Coup period in Turkey, he was arrested for making communist propaganda in a story he wrote when he was 19 years old and sentenced to one and a half years in prison and six months in exile. About five years later, during the shooting of the movie Borders Law, he hit and killed a child while driving under the influence of alcohol in Şanlıurfa. He married Nebahat Çehre in 1967, there were some cases of violence during and before their marriage. After a fight in 1968, Güney drove his car into Çehre and hit her. Çehre's collarbone was broken and she needed stitches on her head. They divorced shortly after the incident. Two years later, he married Jale Fatma.

Background[edit]

Yılmaz Güney was born in 1937 in the Yenice county of Adana. His father was a Zaza Kurd from Siverek and his mother was a Kurd from Varto. His parents migrated to Adana to work as cotton field laborers. As a result of his family background, young Yılmaz grew among the working class. This was a strong background for his future works which generally focused on a realistic portrayal of downtrodden and marginalized strata of the population in the country. Güney studied law and economics at the universities of Ankara and Istanbul, but by the age of 21 he found himself actively involved in film-making.

Career in Turkey[edit]

As Yeşilçam, the Turkish studio system, a handful of directors, including Atıf Yılmaz, began to use cinema as a means of addressing the problems of the people. State-sanctioned melodramas, war films, and play adaptations had mostly previously been played in Turkish theaters. These new filmmakers began to shoot and screen more realistic pictures of Turkish/Kurdish life. Yılmaz Güney was one of the most popular names to emerge from this trend, a gruff-looking young actor who earned the moniker Çirkin Kral ("the Ugly King" in Turkish) or "paşay naşirîn" in Kurdish. After working as an apprentice screenwriter for and assistant to Atıf Yılmaz, Güney soon began appearing in as many as 20 films a year and became Turkey's one of the most popular actors.

The early 1960s brought restricted freedom to Turkey, and Güney was imprisoned from 1960 to 1962.In prison he wrote what some labeled a "communist" novel, They Died with Their Heads Bowed. The country's political situation and Güney's relationship with the authorities became even more tense in the ensuing years. Not content with his star status atop the Turkish film industry, Güney began directing his own pictures in 1965. By 1968 he had formed his own production company, Güney Filmcilik. Over the next few years, the titles of his films mirrored the feelings of the people of Turkey: Umut (Hope, 1970); Ağıt (Elegy, 1972); Acı (Pain, 1971); The Hopeless (1971). Umut is considered to be the first realistic film of Turkish Cinema, the American director Elia Kazan was among the fist to praise the film; “Umut is a poetic film, completely native, not an imitation of Hollywood or any of the European masters, it had risen out of a village environment”.

After 1972, however, Güney would spend most of his life in prison. Arrested for harboring anarchist students,Güney was jailed during preproduction of Zavallılar (The Miserable, 1975), and before completing Endişe (Worry, 1974), which was finished in 1974 by Güney's assistant, Şerif Gören. This was a role that Gören would repeat over the next dozen years, directing several scripts that Güney wrote in prison.

Released from prison in 1974 as part of a general amnesty, Güney was re-arrested that same year for shooting Sefa Mutlu, the public prosecutor of Yumurtalık district in Adana Province, to death in a night club as a result ofa drunken row and given a prison sentence of 19 years. During this stretch of incarceration, his most successful screenplays were Sürü (The Herd, 1978) and Düşman (The Enemy, 1979), both directed by Zeki Ökten. Düşman won an Honourable Mention at the 30th Berlin International Film Festival in 1980.

Güney's first marriage was with fellow Turkish actress, Nebahat Çehre, who co-starred alongside Güney in more thanseveral films. Their relationship began in 1964 and they married in 1967. Prior to his marriage, Güney fathered a daughter, Elif Güney Pütün, from his relationship with Birsen Can Ünal.

Despite Güney and Nebahat Çehre's divorce in 1968, many of those closest to Güney have always regarded Çehre to have been the love of his life.

Later, Güney married Jale Fatma Süleymangil, more commonly known as Fatoş Güney, in 1970. Together, they had a son, Remzi Yılmaz Pütün

Exile and death[edit]

Following the March 12 Memorandum, Yılmaz Güney aided the militant revolutionaries of the People's Liberation Party-Front of Turkey, particularly Mahir Çayan, Ulaş Bardakçı and Hüseyin Cevahir, who escaped from Maltepe Prison and were responsible for the murder of Israeli diplomat Efraim Elrom in exchange for the release of Deniz Gezmiş and his friends. Güney, who was living in Levent, Istanbul with his wife Fatoş Güney at the time, hid them in his own house for a while with the consent of his wife. For this reason, Güney was arrested in March 1972 and sentenced to 10 years in prison by a court decision. After spending approximately two years in prison, Güney was released from Üsküdar Prison on May 20, 1974, taking advantage of the general amnesty issued by the 37th Turkish Government under the prime ministership of Bülent Ecevit.

47 years later in September 1980, Güney's works were banned by the new military junta. Güney declared,“There are only two possibilities: to fight or to give up, I chose to fight”. After escaping from prison in 1981 and fleeing to France, Güney won the Palme d'Or at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival for his film Yol, whose director in the field was once again Şerif Gören. It was not until 1983 that Güney resumed directing, telling a brutal tale of imprisoned children in his final film, Duvar (The Wall, 1983), made in France with the cooperation of the French government. Meanwhile, Turkey's government revoked his citizenship and a court sentenced him to twenty-two extra years in jail.

Yılmaz Güney died of gastric cancer in 1984, in Paris, France.

Gallery[edit]

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