Yılmaz Güney

Yılmaz Güney was born Yılmaz Pütün in 1937 in the village of Yenice in Adana province. His father, Hamit, was a Zaza Kurd from Siverek in Şanlıurfa province. His mother was a Kurmanci Kurd from Varto in Muş province.

His parents migrated to Adana to labor in the cotton fields, and their son grew up in the Kurdish working class. Besides working in the cotton fields himself, he worked as a movie delivery boy and drove a horse cart. His working-class origins form the background to his later realistic portrayals of the downtrodden in Turkish society.

While he was still in high school, he wrote stories for a local magazine, including one about a person aspiring for a better world. The authorities deemed Communist propaganda and put him on trial. 

In 1957, Güney went to Istanbul to study law and economics at the university. Soon after he arrived, he was sentenced to seven and a half years imprisonment for “Communist propaganda.” He appealed the conviction.

Meanwhile Güney was drawn to film-making. Turkish cinemas had hitherto shown mainly state-sanctioned melodramas, war films, and adaptations of plays. But Yeşilçam, the Turkish studio system, had recently welcome a handful of new directors who were using cinema to create more realistic and personal portrayals of ordinary life.

In 1958 one of them, the left-wing director Atıf Yılmaz, cast Güney as a supporting actor in Bu Vatanın Çocukları (The Children of the Fatherland). The same hear Güney got a leading role in Alageyik (Red Deer). He was highly successful, appearing in up to twenty films a year as he rocketed to stardom as one of Turkey’s most popular actors.

The appeals court In Istanbul reduced his prison sentence to one year and a half, but before he could enter prison, the 1960 coup d’état interrupted. He was finally imprisoned in June 1961. In prison he wrote a novel, They Died with Their Heads Bowed, which some labeled Communist. He was released in 1962.

In 1965 Güney began directing his own films, which gave him a degree of  financial freedom. By 1968 he had formed his own production company, Güney Filmcilik (Güney Films). Over the next few years, the titles of his films mirrored the realities of downtrodden people in Turkey, whom he often portrayed as struggling against the mighty and powerful, such as Kasımpaşalı Recep (Recep from Kasımpaşa) and Konyakçı (the Cognac Drinker), both from 1965.

His other films from this period include Umut (Hope, 1970); Ağıt (Elegy, 1972); Acı (Pain, 1971); and Umutsuz(The Hopeless, 1971). Umut is considered to the first realistic film in Turkish cinema. The American director Elia Kazan praised it as “a poetic film, completely native, not an imitation of Hollywood or any of the European masters, it had risen out of a village environment.”