Latest / MUBI Podcast / YOL — The picture made from prison (feat. Alejandro G. Iñárritu)

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YOL — The picture made from prison (feat. Alejandro G. Iñárritu) · MUBI Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_08: Heads up, this episode includes adult language and spoilers.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_08: Sometime around 1982 in Mexico City, an 18-year-old kid named Alejandro G.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_08: Inyaditu went to see a Turkish movie called Yol, or in English, The Road.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_08: He was a little impressed.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_09: I remember the features of this movie and moments of this movie as if they were just I remember it's like a train hit me and it's it just crashes.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_08: The film's an epic about a bunch of prisoners in Turkey who get a one week leave from jail to go home for a holiday.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_08: They spread out to their towns across the country and learn things aren't much freer outside than they are behind bars.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_09: I felt one of these guys in jail, and I felt the pain, and I felt the cold, and I felt the desert, and I felt the dirt in their you know shirts and their skin and their eyes.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_08: In fact, Inyoritu was so inspired he couldn't keep the movie to himself.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_09: The next day I went to my home and my father was uh with a friend, they liked to drink a little bit, and I said, guys, you need to come.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_09: You have to see one of the best.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_09: And my father has a good taste of filmmaking.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_09: He he showed me Fellini, and I thought that he would like it, and we I took them, and they were half drunk.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_09: In this case, they were half drunk.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_08: By the end, though, they'd sobered right up.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_08: In fact, as they left the theater, Inoritu's dad was weirdly quiet, almost morose.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_09: I said, What's going on?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_09: This is just mystery.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_09: I said, My my dad worked on the on the market selling fruits, and he saw a lot of poor people every day suffering, you know, a lot of the dirt in the markets, and she said, This is my life every day.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_09: Why you take me to the cinema to see that?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_09: They didn't get it because they said that it was so painful that it shut down them.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_08: But you must have seen poverty in the markets too.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_08: You were a son.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_08: Um, but Yoel enthralled you.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_08: You've said it's one of the most inspirational films for you.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_08: Why do you think it had such a different effect on you than your dad?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_09: I don't know.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_09: The there was an honesty of it, you know, because this guy wrote it from jail.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_09: When you are on those conditions and you are writing your your your life and your pain from jail, and you direct the film from jail, I mean there's something profound and transcendental that is beyond filmmaking.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_08: He's not exaggerating.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_08: Y'all was written and co-directed from behind bars by a guy who'd basically been labeled an enemy of the state, and then to edit it, he escaped.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_08: So as much as it's about men who are trapped, it was made by a guy who never was.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_08: And in this new season of our show, those are the filmmakers we are gonna celebrate.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_08: I'm Rico Galliano.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_08: Welcome back to the Movie Podcast.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_08: Movie is the global film company that champions great cinema.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_08: On this show, we tell you the stories of how great cinema happens and why it matters.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_08: Today we launched season 12.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_08: We're calling it Under Pressure, with more and more artists today being stifled or threatened by governments.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_08: For the next few episodes, we're telling you about filmmakers who did their work even with the state breathing down their necks.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_08: These are stories of heroism.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_06: I think what unites them all is they have a sense that they have to keep bringing the truth and they can't imagine doing otherwise.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_08: Or sometimes they're stories of horror.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_08: It was established that they might be assassinated.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_08: And sometimes they're stories of straight-up hubris.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_08: Takes a special kind of person to stand up to power.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_08: They're brave, but not always saints.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_08: And today we got a story that ticks all these boxes.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_08: It's the tale of Yuma Zgunay, a Turkish movie star turned auteur who had a Che Guevara level following.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_11: His poster, his picture was everywhere, like in my house where I grew up.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_11: There was poster on the wall.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_08: And he spent about half his career in prison for his activism, his political art, and, at least according to some, a murderous temper.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_08: Man, I think he shot the guy.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_08: He shot the sheriff, man.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_08: That is can and Golden Globe winning director Fatih Akin.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_08: Just like in Yury 2, he is fascinated and influenced by Gunai.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_08: And I spoke mainly to him, but also to Turkish film critics and filmmakers to learn about a complicated guy and a complicated time who ended up making his masterpiece from a jail cell.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_08: So get your papers in order and prepare for a wild ride.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_08: Yomaz Gunai's Road to the Road.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_08: Yo.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_08: Fatiyakin was born in Germany to Turkish parents.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_08: Some of his most celebrated flicks, like 2004 is head-on, are about punk rock non-conformists trying to break out of social boxes.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_08: So I wasn't surprised to hear he spent years in the 2000s writing a biopic about the guy we're here to talk about.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_08: A guy who started life in what sounds like a super tight box.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_12: Yilmaz Gune was part of the Kurdish minority in Turkey.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_12: Born in the 1930s in Adana, which is in southeast of Anatolia.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_12: They were poor, kind of like non-educated.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_12: I mean, his people were like farmers or working on cotton fields.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_08: He grew up with a lot of poverty and discrimination.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_08: As a kid, he saw the government forcibly break up Kurdish communities, scattering them all over the country, so they'd never be a majority anywhere.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_08: In some spots you could get fined just for speaking Kurdish.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_08: So Gunet had no love for authority or the system, and he had a crazy drive to beat it.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_12: And Turkey is not like the United States.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_12: Anything is possible.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_12: You can invent yourself.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_12: You're very much bound in classes, social classes.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_12: If you are not educated, you stay like that.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_12: So to make a crossover in that period of Turkey is something where there is like an enormous will to reach the goal.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_08: And Akin says that crossover started with a bicycle.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_08: See, in the 50s, Gunet was a student in Adana, and for a day job, he took a gig with a film distributor.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_12: He was bringing or transporting wheels, film wheels, from cinema to cinema.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_12: He had this bike, and they were doing a screening in cinema A, let's say, in a certain neighborhood.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_12: The first wheel is like 20 minutes.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_12: The second wheel starts, they give Gunet the wheel.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_12: He was driving with a wheel to cinema B to the city, give the wheel to that cinema so they could start a film and drawing back and forth that both cinemas could show the film with one hour difference or something.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_12: You know, that that was his job.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_08: He got a hell of a workout.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_08: And also an education in movies.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_08: There was like Turkish films, of course.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_12: Uh the Turkish film industry had like, I don't know, 100, 200 films per year, maybe in the 50s.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_12: And there were like American films, but films which were 20 years old.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_12: Charlie Chaplin and stuff.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_12: I think Charlie Chaplin had a big influence on Yulmas Gune.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_12: You know, the especially like the underdog Chaplin who is always fighting with the authorities, you know, with the patrol, the border patrol guys, with the police.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_08: Apparently a favorite, Chaplin's City Lights.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_12: Where he had this blind girl, and the blind girl thinks he's rich, and in the end she finds out it doesn't matter if you're rich or not, you know.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_12: So these kind of like socialistic ideas with justice, I think they were very much his uh cinematographic socialization in the very beginnings.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_08: Gunet started writing those kind of ideas into short stories, which he sent to a local literary magazine.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_08: And right away, one of them drew the kind of fire he was gonna get very, very used to.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_08: Now, I should probably take a second here to explain Turkish politics in this era, but that's impossible.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_08: It would take hours, it was chaos.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_08: Here's the cliff's notes.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_08: In the 50s, the country was basically run by one right-wing political party.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_08: But as you'll see, every few years into the 1980s, there'd be a whole new kind of regime.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_08: And I'll just say none of them were into stories like the one that got Gunet in trouble, which was called Equal with Tree Unknown.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_08: I think Equal with Three Unknown.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_08: Yeah, like a mathematic equal, you know?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_08: The story is basically a dialogue between a rich boy and a prostitute, who, among other things, rages at her quote, crime of being born poor.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_08: Age 18, Gunet was already writing about systemic inequality.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_12: And at those days, Turkey was very much under the influence of the United States, so everything would smell for communism.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_12: I mean, we speak about the 50s.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_08: Communism was the enemy.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_08: Sure enough, they accused him of disseminating, quote, communist propaganda, took Gunay to court, and while his case dragged through the system, he decided to split town.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_08: To Istanbul, where films weren't just being shown, they were being made.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_12: So he ended up as an assistant director.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_12: I mean, first as a set runner, bringing tea and coffee on film sets, and becoming an assistant director.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_12: You know, he was the assistant of uh Lutzu Akat.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_12: He was also working as an assistant for Atifilmas.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_08: These directors were churning out movies by the dozen, so they were always looking for new faces to help him out, off-screen and on.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_08: Soon Atifilmas started casting Genet in lead roles.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_08: Like this one as an obsessed deer hunter in the 1959 flick Ala Geek.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_08: Pretty soon, a totally unexpected star was born.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_11: He was an actor in many Western films, for example, like Spaghetti Western.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_11: Like he acted in more than 120 films, something like that.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_11: It's like unbelievable.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_08: That's Surat Karazlan, one of Turkey's rising star directors.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_08: His shorts and features have won something like 50 awards.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_08: He says he grew up in a house where Ghanai was respected like royalty.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_08: And all over Turkey, they gave him a nickname to match.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_11: Like Ugly Uh King.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_11: He has a name, Ugly King.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_08: The Ugly King.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_11: Yeah, because he was like uh he was not a very handsome I figure.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_11: Yeah, like for example, even these days, like usually very beautiful woman or very handsome actor, they become star, you know, but he becomes star not because of that.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_10: He has a dirty face, you know, your mask has very, you know, his beards and everything.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_10: He has a really dirty face.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_08: Janet Barris is a film critic and lecturer in Istanbul.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_08: And she says with his somehow grimy-looking, craggy face, and unbelievably thick eyebrows, Gunet was the Bogart of his day.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_08: Charismatic despite his looks, and playing Bogardy roles, like gangsters or nihilistic cowboys.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_10: He's quite different.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_10: He looked rough and rebellious.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_10: And at that time we don't have anti-heroes in Turkey cinema, but uh Ilmaz Gunet is one of them.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_10: You know, he became one of the biggest anti-heroes at that time.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_08: It was an image that only got more set in stone in 1961 when his propaganda trial finally ended with a verdict of guilty.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_08: And Fatih Akin says Gunai landed where a lot of his movie characters ended up.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_12: He was putting into jail, and so the first socialization happened.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_12: He was socialized and educated by all the gangsters he was in prison with.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_12: The gangsters taught him how to act, how to behave, how to treat women, you know, uh guns, all that he learned in prison.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_12: So he's coming back out of prison, he's becoming a youth star because of the education he had in the prison.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_08: But then, even as the gangster flicks he was revered for got tougher and tougher, he started writing and directing his own movies, where just like in his short stories, the bad guy was the system.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_12: One of the films, not the most important one, but a good one, is called Achkutlar, Hungry Wolves.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_12: And it's a film about a poor farmer who becomes like a Robin Hood hero and he fights against the authorities.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_12: He had shootings with the authorities.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_12: He's doing this crossover between action films on the one hand, with a socialistic meaning.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_08: Exactly.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_08: Films like Shaitan and stuff.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_08: But then comes Umut.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_08: Umut Hope was made in 1970.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_08: And the title's ironic.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_08: It's about a poor horse and carriage driver named Kabar, played by Genai.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_08: Whose horse gets killed when a rich guy on a joyride sideswipes it with his sports car.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_08: Justice is not served.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_08: Somehow the law says it's Kabar's fault.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_08: With his livelihood ruined, he decides to join one of his poor pals and a preacher on a hunt for a legendary buried treasure.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_12: In a way, it is a remake of a John Euston film.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_12: He's becoming so obsessed with the treasure that he loses like all his friendships and the family.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_08: The last shot is truly haunting.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_08: Kabar tottering madly through the desert in the middle of nowhere, wearing a blindfold, still hoping for his treasure.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_12: The allegory is look what the state is leading you to.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_12: Look what the state is doing with the individual in southeastern Anatolia.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_12: Look what happens if the state is not taking care for the individual.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_12: And that was the turning point.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_12: From that film on, he became a filmmaker, an author, a real filmmaker.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_08: Not just a genre guy.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_12: No, the genre is the past.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_12: There is a moment between the films before and after Umut.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_08: Some will tell you the same goes for Turkish filmmaking in general.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_10: This is the first time in Turkish cinema documentary and fiction came together so closely, like Italian neorealismo.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_10: There are scenes in the movie, you know, you see the streets, people, and the landscapes of the city.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_10: And it almost feels like we are seeing a documentary.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_10: Not a fiction, not a melodrama, not a popular movie or something.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_10: It feels like you are seeing a documentary.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_08: And for the government, it was apparently a little tattoo.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_08: Almost as soon as it hit theaters, Umut was banned.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_08: The state said the movie exaggerated class conflicts.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_08: And at that moment in Turkish history, exaggerating conflicts was the last thing they wanted.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_08: The society starting to come apart.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_12: The 70s in Turkey was a very harsh time between the leftist and the right, you know, the conservatives and the left.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_12: There were killings every day.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_12: You know, there were uh hundreds of people get shot in one day.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_12: It's like a civil war.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_12: Imagine a civil war.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_08: The worst of that hadn't happened yet, but you could feel it coming.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_08: Meanwhile, there was an economic recession, giant labor strikes, student protests against Turkey's ties to the USA.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_08: And into the middle of that, Gunnay had lobbed this movie about injustice like a grenade.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_08: The government wanted it buried.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_08: To screen a mood at Khan, Gunet had to have a print literally smuggled out of the country.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_08: But hey, at least he wasn't jailed this time.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_08: That came a year later, in 71, for something that happened off-screen.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_08: That march, politicians like this guy, Turkish Elder Statesman Ismet Inonu, backed a military takeover of the government.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_08: Supposedly to bring some order in all the chaos.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_08: Except that didn't happen.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_08: In fact, for the next few months there was a left-wing backlash followed by martial law.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_08: And true to form, Gunet put himself right in the middle of it.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_12: One day, some students from an extremist group they hijacked American soldiers.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_08: Kidnapped them, held them hostage.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_08: Yes, yes, hostage.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_08: Eventually these students released the soldiers and fled.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_12: So there was a search and warrant for them, and Gunay hid them in his house.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_12: He was a big star already with a big house, with a big car, with a courier, haunted by uh Paparazzi, and he hosted those those extremist guys in his house, and he got caught.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_08: Or to be precise, according to Sayrat Karaslan, he was eventually caught.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_08: Because at first the police came to the door and they asked about the students.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_11: He said they're upstairs.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_11: But the police thought he he's joking.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_11: They just they just left.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_07: He was like, You want to call my bluff?
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_07: He was like, Oh yeah, yeah, of course I'm hiding students upstairs.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_07: Why don't you go check?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_07: And they're like, okay, you're pulling our leg.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_07: But they were there.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_11: But usually, you know, they said the best way to hide something, just showing it, you know?
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_11: But he was a risk taker, you know, he was someone to always take in the risk, it seems.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_08: Gene was finally caught though, charged with sedition, Got a second trip to prison, and that's where Fatih Akeen says he got his second education.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_12: Before that, he had sympathy with socialism, but he was not a communist.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_12: But in prison, Huné was with the political prisoners this time.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_12: You know, so and they educate him harsh.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_12: I mean, like when he came out of prison after two years, the first thing he did as a director is Arkadash.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_08: That's the story of a left-winger who finds an old friend has gotten rich and shallow and decides to take him back to their village to reconnect him to reality.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_12: I love that movie because you see how much this film has burned inside of Gune while he was in prison.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_12: You see it in the film.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_12: It's a very didactic film.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_12: Here you have someone who has an idea.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_12: Here is someone who wants to teach.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_12: Here is someone who is absolutely convinced, and he uses the tools of cinema to spread his idea.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_08: Once again, the state had locked him up and he'd come out more dangerous than ever.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_08: But lucky for them, they wouldn't have to wait long to get him back in there one last time.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_08: A bloody night at a bar puts Imazguné back behind bars and weirdly sets him up for his best work yet.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_08: That's coming up in just a minute.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_08: Stay with us.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_08: All right, everybody.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_08: Mubi is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_08: We stream movies, we produce them, we distribute them in theaters, movies from any country, from legendary auteurs to brilliant first timers.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_08: We've always got something new for you to discover.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_08: And hey, earlier you heard the great Alejandro Iñoritu talking about the impact Ghanai's film Yol had on him.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_08: Well, you can see some of that influence in Iñoritu's legendary high octane debut, Amores Peros.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_08: In a minute, uh you're gonna hear how Yol paints a picture of a country using multiple storylines.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_08: So does Amores, except it's a snapshot of Mexico City circa the year 2000.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_08: Iñoritu weaves together three different stories about characters from very different levels of Mexico City life, all of them connected by a car crash and dogs.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_08: We've got a new 4K restoration of Amores Pedro streaming worldwide right now on Mubi.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_08: Uh after watching it, highly suggest you go back and take a listen to my movie podcast interview with him about it.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_08: Also featuring his cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_08: It's a really fun conversation.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_08: Also, hey, we have several films by Fatih Akin streaming on Mubi in the USA and elsewhere, including his punk rock comedy Soul Kitchen, which I love.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_08: Uh it's about a bunch of miscreants who managed to open a hit restaurant in Hamburg.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_08: And also, how about a Turkish film?
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_08: We've got Time to Love by Zev Megzamani.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_08: This is a hidden treasure of Turkish cinema, a gorgeous love story inspired by Sufi tales.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_08: You can stream our 4K restoration of Time to Love worldwide.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_08: So I know that was a lot of stuff to throw at you at once, but don't worry, we have all the info and links you need in the show notes of this episode.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_08: Speaking of which, let's get back to the episode.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_08: So it's 1974.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_08: After two years in power, Turkey's military has tentatively handed back the reins to a democratically elected government who decide to give amnesty to a bunch of folks the military guys had jailed.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_08: So Yomaz Gunai gets released from prison.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_08: You're listening to actual news footage of it right now.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_08: Fans and paparazzi converge on him as he comes through the gate.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_08: It's like a star arriving for an award ceremony.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_08: He's free.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_08: Until one night in Adana, just four months later.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_08: There are multiple stories about what exactly went down that night.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_08: Fatih Akin says Gunet's daughter Elif told him this one.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_12: They were shooting a film.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_12: The film's called Endische Anxiety.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_12: They were in a restaurant, and in the restaurant, Yilmaz Gune is doing sound recordings of a gun in the restaurant, while the restaurant is open.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_08: Remember, this is the guy who pioneered documentary realism in Turkey.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_08: If he wanted the sound of a gunshot in a restaurant, he recorded an actual gun in an actual restaurant.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_08: But no surprise, some diners found this not okay, especially one, a local judge.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_12: A prosecutor, and he was he a judge, yeah, he was drunk.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_12: And he was yelling at Gunet, like, what the fuck are you doing here with a gun?
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_12: He was drunk.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_12: They say Gunay was a bit drunk, or they say alcohol was in the game, and then they were yelling at each other, a fight breaks out, and then something happens, and some people say it's true, and some people say it's not true.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_12: I think it happened.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_08: What what happened?
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_12: Gunet killed the uh persecutor.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_08: Now at the top of the episode, I told you Gunet was brave, but no saint.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_08: There's plenty of tales about him being abusive to his first wife, fellow movie star Nebbaha Cherry.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_08: Later, he made a movie with child actors about kids in prison, and Sadak Karaslan says, I saw some video, it's unacceptable.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_11: He's like kind of like hitting them.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_08: Wow.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_08: For make them cry, it's to get like a more emotional performance out of them.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_11: Yeah, it's like unbelievable.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_11: Of course, like the time, the the condition of that time, but still unacceptable.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_11: He was a difficult person.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_08: So even though he insisted in court until the end of his life that he hadn't shot this judge, it's not hard for some folks to imagine.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_12: Later on, I think a nephew of Gune said, I was shooting the guy to protect uh Yilmaz Gunay.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_12: But I think the truth is Yilmaz Gune was so offended by the guy.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_12: There were a woman there, and maybe he said something about fuck your wife, fuck your mother, whatever.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_12: We should not forget, the first education in prison Gune had was with the mafuzis, with the mobsters, with the machos, you know, where honor is very important.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_12: So today there are a lot of people who said this is a setup.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_12: Uh it is a political thing to keep him silent and stuff, you know.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_12: But man, I think he shot the guy.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_12: He shot the sheriff, man.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_08: That's sure what the courts thought.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_08: They sentenced him to 19 years in prison.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_08: And it seemed like whether he'd been set up or done this to himself, the state was finally rid of him for a while.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_08: And his movies.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_08: Except they weren't.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_08: That's a clip from Endichi, Anxiety, the movie Gunet was making the night of the shooting.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_08: It's about a poor farmer with a terrible debt who betrays his fellow workers to try and pay it off.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_08: Gunet only personally directed the first ten minutes.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_08: Then when he went to prison, his assistant, director Sarif Gorin, took over and finished it.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_08: And Gunay thought, why not try something like that again?
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_08: He is in jail and he's doing two films out of jail.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_08: Okay, now explain how this is possible.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_08: How is it possible that from jail he can make like multiple movies?
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_12: Beautiful.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_12: It works like this.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_12: He's writing the screenplay in prison.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_12: He asks for the actors, they come to prison and visit him, and he makes these walks in prison with them.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_12: They don't have too much space to walk.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_12: They go in the yard.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_12: They go back and forth and back and forth.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_12: And all the time, while they're going fast, they talk, and he tells the character.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_12: Like the character is doing that, and you play it like this, and you give like instructions, directions.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_08: That's how production began on a film called Sudu, The Herd.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_08: Gene also got visits from a co-director, said Kiyoktan.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_08: And same deal.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_08: Gunet gave him meticulous directing notes, they drew up shot lists.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_08: Then Uktan went out, shot the raw footage.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_08: And now this is something where it's myth.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_12: You know, I'm not sure if it's really happened like that way, but they say they scream at night the raw footage, the dailies, on the wall of the building next to the prison.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_12: And so all the all the uh inmates in prison they could see the footage and also uh Yomaz Gune.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_08: Yeah, supposedly everyone watched the rushes projected on a building just beyond the prison property.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_12: And then they were like lip-sinking, like yeah, I think he said because they were silent.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_08: In the silent rushes, yeah.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_12: Yeah, yeah, silent rushes.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_12: I think he said that.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_12: No, he said this, uh, no, he said that.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_12: No, he said this about your mother.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_12: You know, this is the one very beautiful uh version of the story.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_12: I think the other version of the story is maybe he had a steam back in prison.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_08: A steampack uh editing deck.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_12: Editing uh table, and he could see uh the material on the editing table.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_12: I'm uh I I prefer the first version because it's more beautiful, you know.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_08: To be fair, the second version's probably closer to the truth.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_08: Because at first, sounds like Gunet's prison stay wasn't exactly high security.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_08: In fact, in 1979, Gunet was visited in jail by a fan, the legendary director Ilya Kazan, who wrote a surprised piece about it in the New York Times.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_12: Kazan visits him in prison and sees how free Gunay is.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_12: Gunet had his own writing room in prison.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_08: Kazan also wrote that Gunet wore civilian clothes and lunched on lamb kebabs from a local shop.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_08: Years later, Gunet contradicted some of this stuff, but still, Akeen says it's pretty clear he wasn't treated like your standard prisoner.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_08: Because there were even with the guards, leftist and rightists.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_08: Could you imagine?
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_08: The guards you're saying were politicized, like he had left-wing guards on the inside who would help him out.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_08: Of course.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_08: Because he was like a superstar.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_08: He was a superstar, he was very popular.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_08: That's how the international film world treated him too.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_08: In 1979, Sudu, about a Kurdish family who get exploited as they try to herd sheep across Turkey, hit the arthouse circuit.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_08: It sold out theaters in Berlin, earned Octane a trophy at the London Film Festival, won the Lakarno Festival in Switzerland, and in 1980 it was all set to compete in Turkey's prestigious Golden Orange Festival.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_08: Except that year, the Golden Orange never happened.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_05: In Turkey today, the face of authority wears a helmet, carries a rifle, the unrelenting face of a military takeover.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_08: While Ghanai had been in jail, outside, Turkey had finally melted down.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_08: Left-wing revolutionaries and right-wing nationalists had basically carved up Turkish cities into little fiefdoms, killing each other in the streets.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_08: So in September 1980, the military took power again and promised order.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_08: Again.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_05: Their stated purpose to halt years of terrorism, economic depression, political paralysis, to stem growing religious militancy.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_05: This they say is a benign kind.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_08: For some Turks, it was a relief, but for artists and activists, especially left-wingers, it was the start of a huge crackdown.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_08: Hundreds of thousands of people were rounded up.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_08: All Gunai's films were banned.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_08: Before the coup, he was hoping he'd get amnesty again.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_08: Now, no way.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_08: In fact, critic Janet Badis says, in and out of prison, life for guys like him got way tougher.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_10: It's getting worse after the coup.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_10: Instead of sociability, it's getting worse and worse after the 70s and after 80s.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_10: So it was tough years for Turkey.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_10: Even if you write short stories, you can be arrested.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_08: Yeah, according to the Kurdish news outlet ANF, the state piled more prison time on Ghanai for his left-wing writing.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_08: Soon he was basically looking at a lifetime sentence.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_08: And that's when he started dreaming up another movie to co-direct with Sharif Gorin.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_08: The last one he'd make from jail or in his country.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_12: YOL is an episodic film.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_12: It is a film about five prisoners who have, because it is a holy day, they get leave for one week.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_12: So we see the destinies of these five characters, and one is losing his passport or his papers, so he gets immediately into jail again, you know, uh like a joke.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_12: And uh one who wants to see his wife, and uh he has sex with her on the train, and they got caught and get beaten up, you know, because it's such an unreligious act.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_08: Get the picture, each of these guys end up realizing they've just traded one kind of prison for another.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_08: 1980s Turkey, where they're hassled by soldiers or trapped by religion or their families or tradition.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_08: If that sounds like some kind of satire though, it feels more like an elegy for a country Gunet loves, even if it's killing him.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_10: Five characters, they are different from each other.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_10: They have all individual stories, but when you collect them together, it's some kind of picture of Turkey.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_10: You know, society, tradition, you know, Kurdish identity, and you can find all of them in it.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_08: You can also find the whole Turkish landscape, from seasides to deserts.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_08: In one story, a prisoner comes home, and he's told that his wife has had to become a sex worker to survive without him.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_08: His outraged family demands he treks to the mountains where she lives to kill her and regain their honor.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_08: But at the last minute, he ends up trying to save her from freezing, carrying her through a snowstorm.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_10: The snow, the snow scenes.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_10: It's so effective.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_10: You know, I even if I forgot the movie and everything, I couldn't forget this snow scenes.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_10: The character is getting small in that big landscape.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_08: It reminds me of Lawrence of Arabia in a way.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_08: Yes, you know these men going through their dramas but dwarfed by a larger world.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_10: Yes, the geography is also some kind of character in the movie.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_08: A place that's beautiful and brutal.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_08: In a way, you could see Yol as Gunet's goodbye to his homeland.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_12: He did not want to escape out of prison.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_12: Um because he loved Turkey so much, in a way.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_12: He loved the motherland so much.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_12: And what was more important, I think, Yilmaz Gune did not want to be named as a coward who had escaped.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_12: But uh, the more time spent, the more difficult it was for Gune to do his film out of prison.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_08: It actually wasn't easy even outside the prison.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_08: Like every few days of shooting, Yoel's producers smuggled the negatives out of the country so they couldn't be confiscated.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_08: And with martial law and curfews blanketing the country, Janet Better says the crew had to shoot undercover.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_10: The lead actor, he gave an interview with maybe 10 years, 20 years ago, and he said that they made the film secretly.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_10: He said they hide the camera in the minibus, and sometimes they shoot the movie without any permission.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_08: Finally, Gunet realized there was no future in this.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_08: In 1981, in a crazy example of life imitating art, he got a holiday leave from prison, just like the characters in his movie, and he never came back.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_12: Yal was done as a Swiss co-production.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_12: The Swiss producers helped him to make the runaway, to escape to Greece, and from Greece to the Switzerland.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_12: And not just Gunay escaped, his wife escaped, and his two children, his son and daughter.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_08: It went so smoothly, Gunet wondered if the government had let him go.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_08: As long as he was in jail or if he went to the gallows, he'd be a martyr.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_08: Now, he was out of their hair.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_03: Please, sir.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_08: I watched a bunch of Gunet's films for this episode, and a lot of which he's playing like workers or peasants.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_08: So it was kind of startling to see this footage of him on the red carpet at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, wearing a white tux.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: special qui est equivalent de la palme d'or
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_08: And then on stage at Cannes Palais de Festival, getting handed the Palme d'or for Yol.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_08: A nice reward after what he and his crew had gone through to make it.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_08: But meanwhile, Turkey's military government revoked his citizenship, banned Yol in Turkey, and they still held sway over Turkish politics for a decade.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_08: Meanwhile, a couple years after Cannes, Gunet died of cancer in Paris, stateless.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_08: To make these movies, he'd sacrificed a lot.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_08: For what?
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_11: So I grew up in the Kurdish region in east of Turkey.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_11: And he was kind of legendary hero for Kurdish people.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_08: Well, Gunet might say, for guys like Sarat Karaslan, who saw the directors' movies when they finally got a wide release in Turkey, 15 years after his death.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_11: There's a big influence on me.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_11: Why I wanted to make a film.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_11: Well, because he was talking about my p my people.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_11: Because before when we we we were watching film on TVs, it was like our lives, our stories are not valuable to being tell.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_11: Strangely, in our minds, it's like cinema is like about some special people, like the people in cities, uh rich people, I don't know, whatever.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_11: But in his cinema, I discovered no, our story also it's uh it's valuable to being told.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_08: And actually, stories like Yol were just as revelatory to a young Fatih Akeen in Germany for the opposite reason.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_12: And I remember as a twelve-year-old to see that film.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_12: First of all, it was a very different Turkey than I knew.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_12: Because my people are from the Black Sea coast.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_12: They're fishermen.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_12: Here you had a film in southeastern Anatolia, you know, with the Kurdish, with the minority, the way they wear, the way they live.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_12: It was very new.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_12: I didn't know about these things.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_12: So what the film did, it opened doors in my head.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_08: So you were like, this is the my heritage is about more than just the fishing villages my parents grew up in.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_12: Of course.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_12: And it made me so curious.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_12: Everything I could find out about Turkey, about this Turkey, I started to find out then.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_12: Later on, I become a leftist.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_12: I become a member of Amnesty International because of, I don't know, tortures and Turkish prison and whatever.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_12: This all started with that film.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_08: This is why I think for a lot of Turks, especially on the left, Gene's sacrifice was worth it.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_08: But I also think it's why you can hear how much some of these same people struggle with the guy as a person.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_11: I don't know, it's a very difficult subject.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_11: I mean, this this part is very hard for me because it likes you are supporting.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_11: It's not at all.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_11: I'm not supporting this personal life, it's unexpectable.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_11: But still, at the same time, these all themes, it's all works we love.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_12: The way he treated women is shitty with a lot of toxic in him.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_12: Can you get past that anymore?
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_12: I learned to separate the artist from the art.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_12: Why?
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_12: First of all, I believe in that artists are windows, you open them, and the the power of art comes through them.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_12: It's not coming just out of them.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_12: This is what I believe on the one hand.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_12: On the second, which is more uh not so spiritual, films are not just done by one person.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_12: Sheriff Goren was also doing Yol.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_12: Um Zekjten was also doing uh Sur.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_12: You see?
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_08: I do actually.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_08: There's also the producers who got the director and the negative out of Turkey safe.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_08: The guy driving the Yol cruise minibus, violating a military curfew.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_08: It's like Inyuritu said, when you see Yol, you're watching something beyond filmmaking.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_08: It's a whole movement of people who would not stop telling their story.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_08: And that's the movie podcast for this week.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_08: Follow us for more stories of filmmakers making movies under pressure.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_08: Next time I talk to a filmmaker who got his films made despite the best efforts of leaders in two countries, Iran and in its own special way, the USA.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: Me being a veteran of like different censorships, I'm very impressed by the American censorship because there's no blood spilt, there's no one in jail, the only thing you need to do is control distribution.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_08: Aliy Abasi, director of the Oscar-nominated Donald Trump biopic, The Apprentice, follow us so you don't miss it.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_08: While you're at it, seriously hit pause and leave a five-star review for the show wherever you listen.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_08: Let folks know we're not your standard movie chat show.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_08: Meanwhile, if you got questions, comments, or a cinema story you think we would love to tackle, send them our way.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_08: Our email is podcast at movie.com.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_08: And now, let's roll credits.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_08: This episode was written and hosted by me, Rico Galliano.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_08: Karamak Eniff is our producer, with help from assistant producer Kat Kowalzik.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_08: Stephen Cologne mastered this episode.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_08: Our original music was composed by Martin Ostwick.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_08: Thanks this week to Karen Rudolph, to Emily Wither for recording Surat, and to Alain Franchineau for recording Janet.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_08: The Movie Podcast is executive produced by me along with F.H.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_08: Echerell, Daniel Kasman, and Michael Taka.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_08: And finally, to watch the best in cinema, subscribe to Movie at Mobie.com.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_08: Thanks for listening.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_08: Go watch the movies.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_08: They matter.