Yol

It shared a Cannes programme with today's other film.

The 35th Cannes Film Festival ran from 14 to 26 May 1982. It opened with the 1916 American silent Intolerance, and its Palme d'Or was awarded jointly to Costa-Gavras's Missing and to this film, Yol. The jury was chaired by the Italian opera and theatre director Giorgio Strehler, with Gabriel García Márquez, Geraldine Chaplin, Sidney Lumet and Mrinal Sen among its members.

A 1916 silent and a 1982 Turkish film, 66 years apart, in the same programme.

They are two versions of the same idea.

Intolerance cuts together four storylines roughly 2,500 years apart; Yol sets five prisoners' one-week leave side by side. Neither film will tell only one story, and in neither is the protagonist a person — it is the structure of several things happening at once.

The difference is scale: Griffith took 2,500 years, Güney took one week. And Yol had the harder job — Griffith had three thousand extras on a Hollywood lot; Güney had a pen in a prison cell.

One more thing links them. Both were cut or banned: a major segment of Intolerance's French story, involving the attempted assassination of Admiral Coligny, was removed before release, while Yol was banned in Turkey and only released there on 12 February 1999 — seventeen years after it took the Palme d'Or.

Watch this one to see the plainest and hardest version of what multi-strand storytelling costs.

土耳其，一所监狱放出一批获准离监的囚犯，每人一周。

有人要回家，去看一个已经不属于他的房间。有人要去找一个不愿意认他的人。有人想去边境。有人只是想知道，妻子还在不在。

他们各自上路，互不相识，也不知道对方的存在。

这一周结束时，没有人回到出发时的位置。

（这里不再往下说。）

A screenplay posted out of a prison cell

Yol premiered at Cannes in May 1982. 124 minutes, a Turkish, Swiss and French co-production, mostly in Turkish, shot on location. It is credited to two directors: Yılmaz Güney and Şerif Gören.

That credit needs explaining. Güney wrote the screenplay in prison — not just dialogue but detailed blocking and camera angles, a shooting script someone else could execute. The person who actually took the crew on location was his assistant, Gören. Güney later escaped from İmralı prison, carried the negatives to Switzerland and completed the edit in Paris. The editing credit is his too.

The production is more like a film than the film

Güney's first choice as a stand-in director was not Gören but Erden Kıral. Displeased with Kıral's footage, he had it destroyed and fired him. That episode became the basis of Kıral's own later film, Yolda.

It is said that Güney and other prisoners watched much of Gören's footage projected on a prison wall.

The score is by Zülfü Livaneli, credited under the pseudonym "Sebastian Argol" — in the judicial climate of post-coup Turkey he did not want trouble over the film.

The cinematographer was Erdoğan Engin.

Five lines that never meet

The film is a portrait of Turkey after the 1980 military coup, threaded through five prisoners granted a week's leave: a man returning to his village, a man who must face his in-laws, a man heading for the border. Their roads never intersect and never explain each other. The structure makes the film read less like a story than like five parallel pieces of anthropology.

Banned for seventeen years

Turkey banned the film for its negative portrayal of the country under military rule. It was not released there until 12 February 1999.

It shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1982 with Costa-Gavras's Missing, and was submitted by Switzerland that year for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film — it was not accepted as a nominee.

Reception: from "masterpiece" to "ponderous panorama"

The split is sharp.

Werner Herzog said in 1982 that it was "one of the films that has touched me so deeply — like barely anything else in the last ten years. It's just a masterpiece." Richard Corliss of Time called Güney "a world-class moviemaker". Leonard Maltin gave it three stars and the word "Incisive". And Alejandro González Iñárritu has said that seeing this film as a young man was the reason he turned to cinema — in 2016 it was one of fifteen films he exhibited in Milan.

The dissent is just as strong. Vincent Canby of The New York Times held that addressing important issues is not the same as great art, calling it "a large, decent, ponderous panorama". In 2016 The Hollywood Reporter, ranking the Palme d'Or winners, placed it 65th and said flatly that the production was a better story than what is on screen. On Rotten Tomatoes, 77% of 13 reviews are positive, averaging 7.3/10 — low for this archive, but this is a divisive film rather than a mediocre one.