Yol (The Road)

The masterpiece of Kurdish and Turkish cinema, Yol won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1982, sharing the prize with Costa-Gavras's Missing. Yılmaz Güney wrote it from his prison cell in Turkey — where he was serving a political sentence — and directed it remotely through his assistant Şerif Gören, following written instructions smuggled out of jail. The film follows five Turkish and Kurdish prisoners granted a short leave from prison to return to their Anatolian families. What they discover is a second, vaster prison: state repression, the heavy code of tribal honour, poverty, persecution of Kurds and the silencing of their language. In one of the film's most painful scenes, a Kurd walks the streets of Diyarbakır where it is forbidden to speak Kurdish. After escaping prison, Güney smuggled the film to Switzerland and edited it there. He died two years later, but Yol became the icon of modern Kurdish cinema.