GENRE: Documentary / History

RUNTIME: 69’

LANGUAGE: Turkish, English, French

STARRING: Barış Atay, Funda Eryiğit

DIRECTOR: İlker Savaşkurt

PRODUCTION COMPANY: Openvisor / Abbas Nokhasteh, Mirage Illimité / Dominique Belloir

The filmmaker, writer and actor Yilmaz Güney directed his greatest films, including The Enemy (1979) and The Road (1982), from within Turkish prisons. In order to avoid spending the rest of his life behind bars, he fled his homeland in 1981 in the hope of someday being able to return in freedom.The documentary Ballad of Exiles Yilmaz Güney (2016) looks at Güney’s last years, spent as an exile in Paris. There, he incorporated the things he had experienced when incarcerated - especially a revolt in the children’s ward of the Ulucanlar prison in Ankara - in the film The Wall (1983). The penitentiary, which he compared with a social laboratory, was recreated in a former monastery not just in the material sense, but also in spirit. Members of that cast and crew, most of whom themselves have fled from Turkey, talk about the intensive period shooting the film, their memories of Yilmaz Güney, their life in exile and art as a refuge.

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