Journey of Hope

Haydar, who lives in a village in Turkey, believes the stories about how well things have gone for those who went to Switzerland, and talks his wife Meryem into it. He sells his animals and his land and raises the fare for two. He is thinking of leaving all seven children behind when his father tells him to take one of the sons along. The journey means first getting out of the country and then crossing the Swiss border over the mountains by way of Italy. The Swiss director Xavier Koller's film came out of a news story from 1988, about a child from a family out of Turkey freezing to death in the mountains at the Swiss border. It won the Academy Award for best foreign language film in 1991. Nur Sürer and Necmettin Çobanoğlu play the mother and father. The account turns migration neither into a literature of victimhood nor into an accusation; it shows in order how the decision was made, who said what, and on whom the cost fell. It remains one of the harshest films made about migration.