Espoir

While revealing many troubles caused by poverty and inequality of opportunity, that film also conveyed to the audience that it is inevitable to find the solution in some supernatural elements and even in mythical phenomena.

"The Assurance that Hope gives is both most pleasant and also most necessary to an existence amidst so many nearly insupportable woes." In these lines from Peter Bruegel's 1560 woodcut, we see Hope surrounded by men involved in one calamity after another of which survival seems impossible; whether drowning at sea or being eaten by sharks, imprisoned or tortured, or on the verge of losing their homes to fire. Is hope a worthwhile thing to have the artist is asking in such hopeless situations? Is it even possible for it to be otherwise for mankind? Umut means Hope in Turkish and when you are so destitute and poor with children who stare at you with hunger that is all you can sometimes have in life: A life which is so unjust and unfair, where the idle rich live in luxury on inherited wealth while the poor slave away for near subsistence. Neo-realistic in tone and beautifully photographed. It's hard not to be moved by the protagonist's desperate plight. It is a critical film about the inhumanity of the capitalist system by a socialist filmmaker. Umut is a rural driver. Instead of a cab, he owns a horse and buggy carriage. Like all working people, he is up to his eyeballs in debt with the banks and other creditors. After all, no working man is allowed to survive on just his salary, the system is rigged to be that way in order to keep us all debt slaves. When the automobile of a rich man kills his horse and the bank forecloses on the other, his life is drastically changed. As a poor man, he knows he can't realistically fight neither the rich man who hit his horse nor the banks who foreclosed on his horse for in a class society neither justice nor charity can prevail. With no ability to feed his family, no jobs to be had, despair quickly sets in until a friend tells him about an Imam that can help them find buried treasure. Despair turns to hope and as more despair sets in, the main character turns more and more to ever greater degrees of hope with the aspiration it will keep him sane.

I didn't know what to expect coming into seeing Umut, only having heard that the critical consensus is that this is the best Turkish film ever made (don't know if that's true). Taken as a whole, this is a challenging film to explain. It is divided between neo-realistic photography and settings, and a story which ends almost surrealistically. It is the story of poverty as injustice, but also poverty as the result of the inaction or foolish actions of those who are poor. It may be read, also, as a comment on capitalism at large, or a comment on masculinity, or a religious commentary, or all of the above, or something else entirely.

Artistically, it is stunning. The available-light photography captures the streets of the city and the dawns on the plain with simplicity and poignancy. However, it isn't perfect - in my opinion, it is weakened by poor acting on the part of several characters (including the primary character's wife especially), and the stock which I saw (on Tour at the Freer gallery in Washington D.C.) had several distracting gaps of several seconds each.

Very realistic example of how much one could be so poor, illiterate and ignorant, the life told in the film is so real that you can't prevent yourself from watching it, even if the quality of the film is very bad, you just watch Cabbar (Yılmaz Güney) and see him dying step by step not finding enough money to buy a new horse (after one of his horses is hit and killed by a car) for his old horse cart wagon (fayton) where there are also Taxi-cabs working.... he loses his horse, and then his creditors stole the other one and sold it together with the "fayton" itself, and finally he has nothing left in his life except a hungry family, a gun, and a friend (great actor, Tuncel KURTİZ) who says there is a treasury near a river in Adana (a city in south middle-east of Turkey), so he goes there with him, accompanied by a healer (üfürükçü).. and faces up to his last hope in life .... The scene where Cabbar hits his wife and shouts at his crying children while smoking cigarette, and while he and his friend trying to dig their own house in the rain hoping to find a treasury, WORTH WATCHING !! the only negative thing for me is the final, and the decreasing tempo till its finished ...

His movies achieved to present details as the well-oriented that come from real Turkish and Kurdish living conditions. As an audience, you are surrounded strikingly by the plot while watching his movies. The feeling is much different than watching an ordinary movie behind the screen. However, I think the main characteristic of his work is not to hesitate to reveal the drama that people are often confronted with intense emotions. The movies produced all of the scenes as real and solid due to block the watchers who prevented by themselves from the real world.This is the just another typical feature of his movies.

He is very good at analyzing Turkish people traits and how to touch their cultural attachments via harsh reality. Without a doubt, he has been the first and the most profound writer of neo-realistic stories and the legendary figure of the controversial filmmaker in the Turkish Film Industry all times.