The Herd

In the Pervari district of Siirt a family lives with a flock of sheep. There is a blood feud between two families, and Şivan and Berivan are in a marriage made because of it. Berivan does not speak; her children died and her voice stopped. The flock has to be sold in Ankara. The family loads the animals onto a train and sets out. Along the way the animals die, the family comes apart, and in Ankara nobody understands them. Zeki Ökten directs. Yılmaz Güney wrote the screenplay while in prison and directed the process from there. Tarık Akan plays Şivan, Melike Demirağ plays Berivan and Tuncel Kurtiz the grandfather. The subject is migration and speechlessness. Berivan's silence stands as a figure; the family is not understood in the city either, and a story lived in Kurdish had to be filmed in Turkish. The conditions of the production are therefore part of the narrative. The train journey is the spine; the closed wagon, the animals and the steadily worsening situation are shown without relief. It won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno film festival in 1979 and became one of the most cited films in Turkish cinema. It was placed seventh in the list of the ten best Turkish films of the century announced by the Turkish Film Critics Association in 2015. The narrative gives none of its characters a way out and the ending is without hope. Who it is for: anyone interested in the history of Turkish cinema and in social realism. Who it is not for: the film is very bleak, the pace is heavy, and some prints are in poor condition.