Umut (film)

Hope (Turkish: Umut) is a 1970 Turkish drama film, written and directed by Yılmaz Güney and Şerif Gören, featuring Güney as an illiterate horse cab driver, who, after losing one of his horses in an accident, sets out into the desert in a quest for a mythical lost treasure. The film, which wasn't released at the time because of a ban by Film Control Commission in Turkey, won awards at the 2nd Adana Golden Boll Film Festival, the 7th Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival and was screened at the 23rd Cannes Film Festival.

Filming of Umut began in April 1970 in Çukurova, Turkey following the director's return from military service. Güney wanted Umut to be a film showing the defects and contradictions of a reality without any actualization of a revolution and the illness of the socio-economic system of its time.

Umut has a reputation for being the archetype of the revolutionist cinema and neo-realismo stream in Turkey. The film has been compared to films of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini. A lot of foreign, as well as national, cinema critics wrote about Güney’s Umut in comparison to Ladri di Bicyclette by De Sica and Zavattini, an Italian production shot in 1948, which captured the Oscar prize in 1950 and is an important example of the Italian neo-realismo stream.

The protagonist of the film is Cabbar (performed by Güney). Cabbar is directed to support his crowded kurdish family - five children, a wife, and a grandmother - with the earnings from an old phaeton with two exhausted, half-dead horses. The family tries to survive in a damp and dingy living-quarters. Cabbar does not have a good run of business. He is indebted almost to everyone. His single hope is in the lottery tickets, which he continuously buys. He has bound his hope to these pieces of paper.