The Road

Five prisoners are given a week's leave. Each goes to his own part of the country. One learns that his wife has been shut in a stable by her family; she is expected to die, on grounds of honour. One has lost his wife and is trying to find his children. One cannot face his family because he ran and left his brother behind. One enters a zone of armed conflict in the southeast. All of them will return to prison at the end of the week, and the outside turns out to be more closed than the inside. Şerif Gören directs. The screenplay is Yılmaz Güney's; he was in prison at the time and directed the film from there. He then escaped abroad and did the editing himself in Switzerland. The film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982, shared with Costa-Gavras's Missing. It was banned in Turkey for many years and was only released there at the end of the nineties. What the narrative builds is not the difference between the prison and the country but their likeness; the characters carry a leave permit outside too, and everywhere they are asked for papers. Its best known strand is the one in the snow; it is the hardest part of the narrative and explains nothing anywhere. The scenes spoken in Kurdish were silenced in the first version and restored in later ones. Who it is for: anyone who wants to see one of the most important works of cinema from Turkey. Who it is not for: the register is heavy, there is little hope, and the film gives no character an easy way.