The Conquest of Liberty By Marcel Martin

This film may be seen as an homage of its director to the man who was a kind of a “master” to him, the late great Yilmaz Guney, who died in exile in Paris in 1984. Yet Yolda shows the violent fracture between the two men, referring to what happened more than twenty years ago when Guney kicked Kiral off the shooting of his film Yol which the latter was about to shoot instead of Guney, who was prohibited from making the film because of having been in exile.

Yolda means “On the Road” and the film tells the story of a day when Guney is being transferred to another prison in a car and asked Kiral to follow them in his own car with Guney’s wife. Their long journey into the country to an address the policemen can’t find ends in the middle of nowhere. His film is based, Kiral says, on a real incident but changed to talk about ” captivity and freedom” : by being excluded from the shooting, Kiral feels free from a kind of prison he has built himself as a pupil of this “master” and he then becomes the winner in their confrontation because he is hurt but free. What he says is “Each life has a price to pay.” Thus this strange and fascinating film can be seen as a parable on the conquest of liberty.