Hope

Cabbar drives a horse cab in Adana and keeps a large family on what it brings in. One day a car kills one of his horses. The driver is wealthy and Cabbar cannot get redress; at the police station and while looking for work he meets the same wall. In the end he attaches himself to a hodja and looks for deliverance in hunting for buried treasure. Yılmaz Güney wrote, directed and produced it, and played Cabbar himself. The censorship board banned the film. The reasons were written out one by one: that the cab driver's clothing stood for poverty, the attitude of the police towards the rich man in the station scene, the class distinction in the search for work, and the robbing of an American. After the ban the film was taken out of the country. Arif Keskiner, the brother of producer Abdurrahman Keskiner, carried a print to France with Güney's permission, and it was shown at the Cannes film festival in 1971. The source is personal; Güney drew the story from his own father's life. Its method was new for Turkish cinema at the time. There is no melodrama, almost no music, most of the cast are local people, and it was shot in real places in the Çukurova plain. The final section takes the film somewhere else. The dig breaks away from the narrative at a certain point and becomes a circular, hopeless scene outside realism. Who it is for: anyone interested in the history of Turkish cinema and in social realism. Who it is not for: the film is dark and offers no way out, the pace is slow, and most surviving prints are in poor condition.