Elegy

Coban and his four comrades are smugglers living in mountains that are hard to reach. They are as hard and as pitiless as the country they live in; their daily business is greed, danger, betrayal and killing. The state is after them, and the villagers compete with each other to inform and collect the reward. The film makes the smuggler neither a hero nor a bandit; it shows him as the product of a landscape that has left him no other choice. The account is interested not in what smuggling pays but in what staying up in the mountains does to a man. The villagers informing on one another for a reward stands there as part of the same poverty. Yilmaz Guney directed the film and played the lead himself; the censorship board had one scene cut out of it.