Yılmaz Güney-Umut ('Hope') (1970)

"Umut" is the story of an illiterate man and his family, whose existence depends on his income as a horse cab driver. When one of his horses is killed by an automobile, and when it is clear that neither justice nor charity will prevail, the man, played by Yılmaz Güney, begins a slow slide into despair. On the advice of a local holy man, and fuelled by an indefatigable optimism, he sets out into the desert in quest of a mythical lost treasure, slipping further and further into that final, ineluctable moment where hope itself becomes the last terrible delusion. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0066500/plotsummary)




This is a movie that tries to reveal social inequalities, as most of the ordinary Turkish movies do, but so realistically that it seriously disturbs the authority. A true masterpiece which is a milestone in Modern Turkish Cinema… (http://imdb.com/title/tt0066500/usercomments)




I didn't know what to expect coming into seeing Umut, only having heard that the critical consensus is that this is the best Turkish film ever made (don't know if that's true). Taken as a whole, this is a challenging film to explain. It is divided between neo-realistic photography and settings, and a story which ends almost surrealistically. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0066500/usercomments)




It is the story of poverty as injustice, but also poverty as the result of the inaction or foolish actions of those who are poor. It may be read, also, as a comment on capitalism at large, or a comment on masculinity, or a religious commentary, or all of the above, or something else entirely. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0066500/usercomments)




Artistically, it is stunning. The available-light photography captures the streets of the city and the dawns on the plain with simplicity and poignancy. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0066500/usercomments)




The critic J. Hoberman once described the Turkish filmmaker Yílmaz Güney as “something like Clint Eastwood, James Dean, and Che Guevara combined”, (1) and for anyone familiar with the particulars of his career, it's sometimes astonishing that this roughneck-star-auteur ever actually existed. A wildly popular action movie star whose bloody genre knockoffs gave way in the 1970s to an intensely humanist and politically committed cinema, he not only became Turkish cinema's leading figure (not to mention its only representative on the international stage), but also its renegade outlaw prince. (http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/05/guney.html)




More than two decades after his untimely death in exile, his spectre haunts Turkish cinema today: his face can still be seen on the covers of numerous magazines, and several films – both documentary and fictional – have been made about his life over the last decade. (http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/05/guney.html)




Güney's artistic breakthrough came with Umut (Hope) in 1970, generally acknowledged as his first masterpiece. In it, Güney himself plays Cabbar, an impoverished, naive horse-cab driver duped into searching for buried treasure. Those familiar with the actor/director's earlier work will recognise the victim narratives of those violent genre films in the early scenes of Umut. But instead of getting even, Güney's character descends further and further into delusion, until the film becomes an ironic, surreal, at times bitterly comic, repudiation of its title. (http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/05/guney.html)