Yılmaz Güney

Yılmaz Güney — Biography

Yılmaz Güney (born Yılmaz Pütün; 1 April 1937 in Yenice, Adana - 9 September 1984 in Paris) was an actor, director, screenwriter, producer, editor, writer and poet. The sources describe his origins differently: Turkish Wikipedia calls him a Turkish filmmaker of Kurdish and Zaza descent, English and Persian sources a Kurdish director. He made his films in Turkish; he devoted his work, from a left-wing perspective, to the condition of working people and to the depiction of the Kurdish people, their culture and their language.

He left the law studies he had begun at Ankara University and studied economics at Istanbul University. He began acting in 1959. In 1961 he was arrested on the charge of communist propaganda in a story he had written at the age of nineteen; according to Turkish sources he was sentenced to a year and a half in prison and six months of internal exile. He then became one of the biggest box-office actors of Yeşilçam and was known by the nickname associated with the Çirkin Kral films.

In 1966 he moved into directing with At Avrat Silah; the following year Hudutların Kanunu, which he wrote and acted in, brought him prominence, and in 1968 he founded his own production company. According to Turkish sources, during the shooting of that film he was driving under the influence in Şanlıurfa and caused the death of a child. In 1967 he married the actress Nebahat Çehre; Turkish sources report incidents of violence in the marriage and that the couple divorced shortly after Güney drove his car at Çehre in 1968. Two years later he married Fatoş Güney.

Having started out in adventure and action films, Güney turned from the late 1960s to social and political narratives. His first major work in that vein was Umut (1970), which he directed; it was followed by Ağıt, Baba, Arkadaş and Endişe. In 1972 he was sentenced to prison for aiding militants of the People's Liberation Party-Front of Turkey, and was released under the general amnesty of 1974.

That same year, while in Adana for the shooting of Endişe, he was accused of the killing of the judge Sefa Mutlu. Turkish sources attribute the killing directly to him; English Wikipedia states that he denied the charge, and the Greek source reports that the death followed a fight. The sentence also varies: the judgment appears as nineteen years in Turkish and German sources, and in the Greek source as twenty-four years reduced to eighteen. He went on writing in prison; Sürü (1978), which he scripted, won the Golden Leopard at Locarno in 1979, and Düşman (1980) is also among the works of this period.

After the coup of 12 September 1980, he failed to return from a leave from the Isparta semi-open prison in 1981, fled abroad and settled in France. Yol, which he wrote, produced and edited and which his assistant Şerif Gören shot, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982; according to French sources the award was shared. Duvar (1983), made in France, was his last film. In 1983 he was stripped of Turkish citizenship; in the same year he founded the Kurdish Institute of Paris together with the Kurdish poets Cigerxwîn and Abdurrahman Şerefkendi. Winner of the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize and of Golden Orange awards, Güney died of stomach cancer in Paris on 9 September 1984, at the age of forty-seven.