Bride of the Earth

Güney, a stubbornly individualistic, rabble-rousing talent whose cinema stirred together Kurdish/Turkish folklore and aspects of the Western into a potent and highly politicized compound, took on the lead role in this lyrical yet naturalistic breakthrough work, strikingly lensed in black-and-white widescreen, about an impoverished Anatolian villager, Seyyit, who swears revenge upon learning that a wealthy landowner has been pitching woo to his lover (Nebahat Çehre) with the intention of taking her as his wife. An ideal introduction to a larger-than-life figure described by J. Hoberman as “something like Clint Eastwood, James Dean, and Che Guevara combined,” and affectionately nicknamed “the Ugly King” by his adoring public.