Plot
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.
Life is, on the other hand, getting even harder day by day. A Mercedes hits the horse, while it stands parking alongside sidewalk. In this traffic accident his horse dies. Cabbar is innocent but weak as well. This accident makes him see that the established order is accorded to the “poor and strong”. Even the police finds him guilty.
Henceforth he sells the few sticks, which he owns only. He scratches together some money to buy a new horse. In the meantime, the creditors sell the phaeton and the remaining horse, and shared the money according to the debts of Cabber between themselves.
Cabbar is plunged into despair. A friend of Cabbar, Hasan, has been inculculating the turning up a buried treasure into Cabbar. In his helplessness, Cabbar lends himself to illusions. After a preachers faith healing sessions they -Cabbar, Hasan, and the preacher- go on treasure’s way. In the second half of the film, this search for the unfindable treasure is narrated. This search is a natural continuity of the gradually worsening events, which makes Cabbar take refuge on the preacher, in whom he had no belief at all at the beginning.
As can be seen, Güney set down three alternatives for Cabbar: First, he goes after the preacher and searches the treasure; second, he continues to show attitude of expectancy in the lottery tickets; third, he takes part in an organized opposition with other phaeton drivers. However, Cabbar runs away from political and social activities and lastly he becomes a victim of empty promises. He escaped realities and looks for the shelter in fantasies. Güney could make Cabbar politically conscious, even make him the leader of this opposition, and lastly lead him to success or failure, but Güney chose to leave his protagonist blind.
The film finished with an interesting and striking scene. Cabbar, who left his wife, children, and mother desperate in the cause of treasure search, opens his hands to a God, whom he does not know, he begins to turn around in the middle of arid lands. He has gone mad.
Read more about this topic: Umut (film)
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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)