Hope

Having also been selected by several other researches and polls as The Best Turkish Film , Hope represents a turning point Güney’s career: it is a masterpiece which marks the end of the “Ugly King” period and begins the “Yılmaz Güney Phenomenon”… Hope is the first and most important example that reveals how much Yılmaz Güney was affected by Italian Neo Realism. Neo-realism- the cinematic movement that reflects the reality of poor, supressed people without the use of cliches or artificiality- was not merely a source of inspiration for Güney: it can be observed that he also contributed a lot to Neo Realism with this film.

Cabbar, the poor coachman from Adana, struggles to support his wife, his old mother and his five children, under dire living conditions. The lottery tickets he invested his hopes in will not bring anything, his luck has abandoned him. The debt collectors harass him, he is pushed around, humiliated, one of his horses dies and the other is confiscated. He has no other option but to search for some buried treasure… a Hoja indicates where it may be found. The second part of the film portrays the search for this treasure. Yılmaz Güney depicts horrific poverty and desperation with an unprecented sobriety. This directness does not prevent the film from attaining a magnificience that can only be defined as ‘chilling’. The characters are so succesful, the events so affecting, the social criticism so accurate and the resulting cinema so strong that it is impossible not to be affected.

Yılmaz Güney wrote the script, directed and acted in Hope. And lived through it as well… The reality of the children beaten for 25 kurush they spend to ride a bicycle, the aggrieved women, the dog licking the milk, the dying horse. These images reverberate in the cinema like a scream from the screen.

Hope is one of the thankfully “unburied” treasures of the cinema history!