He rests in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. However, his cinema has not died. It still walks the roads of Mesopotamia with its hanging gardens, the bleak steppes of Anatolia, the squares of African villages, and the art and culture museums of Europe—because an artist dies only in body, while their works, having gained universal acclaim, endure as a testament through their history and memory.
Who Is Yılmaz Güney?
Yılmaz Pütün was born on April 1, 1937, in Yenice, Adana. Of Sûrejcî origin, he was a Zaza Kurdish child who entered cinematic history under the moniker “The Ugly King.” An actor, director, screenwriter, poet, and writer, he was above all a witness to history.
He entered the world of cinema in 1959, acting in action and adventure films for years before shattering the status quo after 1970. He turned his camera away from palace halls and directed it toward the earth, giving voice to the underground of Kurdistan and Anatolia. In Hope (Umut), he embodied the helplessness of a carriage driver; in The Herd (Sürü), he depicted the migration of the poor; in The Road (Yol), he brought the pain of the Kurds to the silver screen; and in The Wall (Duvar), he tore down the prison’s four walls.
He transformed the memory of Turkish cinema through the screenplays he penned from behind prison bars. In 1982, The Road became the first film by a Kurdish screenwriter to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. That award was a cry rising from a prison cell that resounded across the global stage.
An Eventful Political Life: From the Cell to Cannes
Yılmaz Güney did not merely hold a camera; he stood at the very heart of the history of the oppressed. Following the military coup of March 12, 1971, he was sentenced and imprisoned on charges of spreading political propaganda. Upon his release, he returned to writing. In the period leading up to the September 12, 1980 coup, he was already detained, this time on İmralı Island—and it was from behind those walls that the screenplays for The Road and The Wall were born. They failed to break his pen.
In October 1981, he escaped from İmralı Prison and achieved his freedom—an escape reminiscent of a cinematic script itself. Leaving Turkey behind, he sought asylum in Paris; though exiled, he was free.
Exactly one year later, in May 1982, The Road won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The award was presented in his name before a vast audience of Turkish, Kurdish, and European art lovers amidst thunderous applause. That night, the applause rising in the Cannes auditorium was not merely for a film, but for the voice of a people someone sought to silence.
In 1983, alongside Cigerxwîn and other Kurdish intellectuals, he founded the Kurdish Institute of Paris. He transformed exile into a center of memory, declaring: “If you silence me here, I will speak.” His citizenship was revoked, yet nationality could never surpass his art.
The Cinema of Kurdish Memory
To understand Yılmaz Güney, one must understand Mesopotamia, the suffering of the Kurdish people, and the colonial policies of denial, assimilation, and erasure—for Mesopotamia is humanity’s primary memory. The Sumerians wrote on clay tablets, the Assyrians carved on bas-reliefs, and in Sûrejc, the capital of the Shaddadids, the Dengbêj preserved history through story and song. In this region, memory survived not only in written form, but through oral traditions. Empires rose and fell, and kingdoms collapsed, yet elegies, epics, and kılams remained alive, passed down through generations. In Mesopotamia, art, poetry, and the Dengbêj tradition were the sole institution safeguarding history. Yılmaz Güney was of this lineage; he too wrote on clay tablets with his camera, though his tablet was the silver screen.
He captured the pain, denial, forced displacement, and resistance that the state claimed did not exist—the migration in The Herd, the mountains in The Road, and the desperate cry in The Wall. All were modern reflections of a Mesopotamian memory spanning tens of thousands of years. Thus, Güney was never a mere local director; he was a master artist and a great Dengbêj who carried Mesopotamia’s oral heritage into the realm of cinema.
In His Own Words: “An Assimilated Kurd”
In an interview in Paris, he was asked when he realized he was a Kurd. His response was a frank confession:
“I am forced to admit that I am an assimilated Kurd. My mother was Kurdish, and my father was a Zaza Kurd. Throughout my childhood, Kurdish and Zazaki were the languages spoken in our home. I spoke Kurdish until the age of fifteen, after which I was separated from my family. During those times, I used to hear claims that Kurds and the Kurdish language did not exist; yet I also saw people speaking Kurdish and singing, and I witnessed Kurds living under extremely harsh conditions. My father was from Sûrejc, and I saw Sûrejc for the first time when I was sixteen—it was then that I truly understood who I was. I learned the suffering of a family uprooted from its origins. My father once told me: ‘You have been uprooted from your roots.’ At the age of thirty-four, I was able to see Muş, the birthplace of my mother and the Jibran tribe. The film The Herd is the story of what happened to that tribe.”
Here begins Güney’s cinema—in the pain of uprooting. Güney was not merely an actor who broke the conventional molds of Yeşilçam under the title of “The Ugly King”; he was a courageous storyteller. He passed away on September 9, 1984.
Ronahî Newspaper
Note: This text is translated from the original Arabic version… Read the Arabic version:Click here
