Want to watch a sweet film about a Kurdish family from Turkey making their way to Western Europe? I recommend Journey of Hope, the 1990 Academy Award Winner for best foreign film. It’s a Swiss/Turkish collaboration and seen from the historical vantage point of 2016 it’s, well, it’s so pre-9/11. Remember when we’d never heard of Kurds? Can you believe there was a time when Swiss border guards would be shocked to find someone, or a group of someones, trying to sneak over the mountain into their country?
I’ve watched a number of “illegal immigrant” films. A great comparison to this one would be Welcome (2009), about an Iraqi Kurd living illegally in Calais, France, and trying to get across the English Channel to reunite with his girlfriend in London.
In both films, it is ultimately nature that undoes the journey, not the humans. Although you watch Journey of Hope constantly fearing the worst from the people our family encounters, realizing all along the way how vulnerable and dependent they are on the various smugglers that make the route possible, everyone more or less does what they promise (for a fee of course). Only the countryman, the final link in the chain, behaves dishonorably, putting an entire group of immigrants at risk.
Know who behaves wonderfully? The Swiss! The Europeans are shown to be caring, welcoming caregivers throughout the entire film. There’s an Italian seaman who literally holds their lives in his hands, a Swiss truck driver, and the guests at a Swiss hotel, as well as the officials there. They respond with compassion and integrity. (The police have some questions, of course, but ultimately they’re gentle and likable and concerned first and foremost with the lives of the immigrants.)
In Welcome, too, the purpose of the film was to raise questions about laws punishing those who helped refugees in Calais. The film contributed to a national debate and legislation was actually drafted and debated but not ultimately passed.
From the perspective of 2015, with more than one million refugees flooding over the borders from Syria through Greece and Turkey and on to Western Europe, and far more harrowing journeys than the ones depicted in both these films, the depiction of the immigrant’s trip in Journey of Hope seems impossibly simple. We are left to ponder the new vocabulary we have developed in a decade: of immigrants in shipping containers, ruthless smugglers, and the relentless challenges of mountains and bodies of water to be crossed. Not to mention more than a million people– forced to take the grandparents and children and not worry about papers– fleeing not just poverty but also bombs. If nothing, it should alert us to the overwhelm and scope of tragedy of our current world situation.
** For a Turkish perspective on the complexity of the German/Turkish immigrant situation, watch The Edge of Heaven by Fatih Akin.
Susan, watched Journey of Hope last night with my student from Afghanistan. The beginning made him homesick, as it was so like Afghanistan. Also looked similar to a Muslim area of China where I have traveled. The rest of the film was painful for me, such a difficult journey, and then the painful ending. My student looked on it as information that needs to be disseminated. Very true.
He is finishing high school with help of a full scholarship and awaiting acceptance with scholarship at an American university. If he didn’t have this assistance his story might be that of the film.
Thanks for your film review. Reva
I’m so glad you watched it. Didn’t you think there was an innocence to it? At every step we expected people to be scoundrels, and usually they were not! We realized how jaded we’ve become about people taking advantage of and exploiting refugees.