Despite the fact that it was actually shot by his associate Serif Gören, Yol remains Güney’s best-known and celebrated film. One of his darkest films, Yol offers an important summation of Güney’s cinema with its tale of a group of released prisoners. Ironically, their release is only temporary and may not even be a blessing, for each return home only to find themselves as imprisoned as when they were in jail. Yol makes clear that life in Turkey under military rule was itself a kind of Kafka-esque prison, with prisoners their own jailers, keeping each other in check through despotic families and constricting social mores - trapped between fascism and what Güney called “the moral debris left behind by feudalism and patriarchy.” – DP