At a "half-open" detention facility and work camp on the island of Imrali, a group of hopeful, but resigned men ritualistically converge on the entrance of the main penitentiary ward: first, for the disbursement of weekly mail and subsequently, for the eagerly anticipated posting of the list of prisoners authorized for a one-week furlough. A soft-spoken, unassuming man named Yusuf (Tuncay Akça), dispirited by the scarcity of letters from home, seemingly finds his fortune changed when he finds his name among the privileged list of furloughed prisoners. Mehmet (Halil Ergün), a pensive and conflicted man faces his trip to Diyarbakir with great trepidation and anxiety, having found his marriage increasingly strained when his wife begins to question his role in her brother's death during a bungled robbery.

A vibrant and self-assured young man, Mevlat (Hikmet Çelik), finds his romantic notions to reunite with his fiancée Meral (Sevda Aktolga) thwarted when her family dispatches chaperones in order to prevent the couple from being alone. An idealistic and apolitical man named Omer (Necmettin Çobanoglu) who daydreams of his idyllic life amid the lush, grazing open fields of his beloved village in Kurdistan returns home to the chaotic sight of his town under siege by the military as they attempt to root out suspected insurgents in the closely knit community. A rugged, unemotional prisoner named Seyit (Tarik Akan) receives a letter from his family explaining that his wife Ziné (Serif Sezer) had dishonored their clan by resorting to prostitution, and was sent with their son to her parents' home at a mountain village in the frozen hinterlands. Now issued a temporary permit to return home, he vows to redress the shame of his wife's infidelity and restore honor to both families.

Realized on film by Yilmaz Güney's assistant director Serif Gören based on the screenplay by - and technical direction of - imprisoned political prisoner, author, actor, and filmmaker Güney, Yol is an elegantly spare, haunting, and socially relevant portrait of repression, tyranny, isolation, and inhumanity. By juxtaposing images of transnational public transportation (in particular, trains and rural buses) and varied landscape that characterize the disparate paths of the furloughed prisoners, Güney illustrates, not only the country's innate cultural and ethnographic diversity, but more importantly, the universality of oppression and the erosive, incalculable toll of Turkey's continuing political and socio-economic instability following the military coup of 1960 and subsequent military interventions of 1971 and 1980. Moreover, through repeated episodes of martial law curfews, random check points and inspections, and civilian searches, Güney draws an implicit parallel in the paradoxical status of the conditionally liberated prisoners with the broader depiction of curtailed personal freedom among the general population under the nation's military rule. Inevitably, the sad, often tragic plight of the prisoners' elusive search for a sense of normalcy serves, not only as a microcosmic representation of life under political instability and a repressive regime, but also as a distilled and elementally human contemporary document of desolation, struggle, compassion, and perseverance.

Part social realism in its searing depiction of the plight of the underprivileged against the transforming economy of an increasingly modernized Turkey, and part poetic essentialism in its psychological portrait of a desperate man succumbing to the mania of a delusive, blind faith, Yilmaz Güney and Serif Gören's Umut (Hope) captures the precarious atmosphere of a nation at a political and economic crossroads. The cultural climate of transformation and renewal is prefigured in the film's opening montage - an impromptu city symphony created by the early morning rituals of road washing trucks, sidewalk sweepers, street vendors, billboard gazers (not coincidentally, all advertising banking institutions), and waiting taxicabs that play out against a dozing Cabbar (Yilmaz Güney), an uneducated cart driver waiting in the wings of a station for commuters to arrive at the terminal. Immediately, the passengers' selected mode of transportation reveals an intrinsically bifurcated society, as people wearing modern, Western attire make their way towards a row of idling taxis, while people dressed in traditional clothing invariably board horse-drawn carriages lining the front of the station...that is, all except for Cabbar's shabby and woefully old-fashioned cart. Already leading a hardscrabble existence as the family's sole provider - one that includes five children whose financial demands for school expenses and playful whims are often weighed against the more fundamental needs of having enough food to eat and proper health care for an elderly parent - and plagued by compounding debts that have accumulated in the course of establishing (and maintaining) his out of fashion livelihood, his situation takes a further turn for the worse when a roadside accident delivers a tragic, final blow to his already struggling enterprise. Left without a means of earning a living, Cabbar follows the advice of his unemployed friend, Hasan (Tuncel Kurtiz) and seeks guidance from Hüseyin Hodja (Osman Alyanak), a mystical imam and village faith healer who would soon lead him away from his family in search of an elusive, ever-shifting panacea amidst the desolation and rubble of a parched, forgotten land.

In a way, Umut may be seen as an adumbration of Djibril Diop Mambéty's Le Franc in its cautionary tale of an insoluble debt that has metastasized into a vicious circle of delusion and gullibility, and the parasitic dependency created by institutionalized, arbitrary, windfall mechanisms that systematize poverty and disenfranchisement. This moral passivity (and consequently, victimization) is introduced in the establishing images of Cabbar: initially, through an incisive shot that frames a wash truck approaching his cart as he sleeps in the foreground, figuratively washing him away, in his oblivion, from the streets in the automated sweep of modernization; then subsequently, from his repeated requests to check his lottery ticket at a newsstand against the day's winning numbers, unable to read the posted numbers on the newspaper himself. At each instance, Cabbar's daily ritual is presented against undermining acts of intervention that render his apparent self-reliance an illusion. Visually, Güney and Gören reflect this rupture between perception and reality through the jarring juxtaposition of interstitial, highly formalized, chiaroscuro landscape shots (often resembling cutout animation) against rough hewn, neorealistic images of struggle and despair. Moreover, Cabbar's decision to follow Hodja's visions also represents a conscious, if unwitting, disempowerment in lieu of direct action and sociopolitical engagement: a rejection that is also suggested in his recusal from a planned cart driver strike, citing the confiscation of his vehicle. In essence, Cabbar's relegation of destiny into the hands of impotent fate reveals an underlying social schism - a division that is implied in the foreshadowing shot between modernity and tradition at the station - that, in turn, exposes the folly of inaction. Concluding with the image of a blindfolded Cabbar aimlessly turning in circles to divine his fortune, Umut illustrates that despair lies, not in the absence of hope, but in its hollow, inert persistence.