General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Journey of Hope

Journey of Hope (German: Reise der Hoffnung, French: Voyage vers l'espoir) is a 1990 feature film directed by the Swiss filmmaker Xavier Koller, telling the story of a Turkish farming couple who sell everything they own to travel illegally with their young son to Switzerland, a country they know only from a postcard¹. A co-production of Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, it premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in August 1990, won the festival's Bronze Leopard, and received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1991¹^•².

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Reise der Hoffnung; world premiere August 1990 at Locarno¹
Director and writers	Directed by Xavier Koller; screenplay by Koller and Feride Çiçekoğlu³
Principal cast	Necmettin Çobanoglu as the father Haydar, Nur Sürer as the mother Meryem, Emin Sivas as the son Mehmet Ali⁴
Basis	A real incident of 13 October 1988, in which a seven-year-old Turkish boy died of exhaustion and hypother crossing the Splügen Pass into Switzerland⁵
Awards	Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, 1991; Bronze Leopard, Locarno 1990¹
Production	Catpics, Condor Films AG, Antea s.c.r.l., and Dewe Hellthaler International; producers Alfi Sinniger and Peter-Christian Fueter¹
Languages	Italian, Swiss German, and Turkish; color, 35 mm¹

Spoilers

Plot

Haydar and Meryem live in a poor village in southeastern Turkey with their children and Haydar's aging parents. A postcard from friends who emigrated to Switzerland, describing work, money, and plentiful food, convinces Haydar to follow them⁶. He sells the livestock, the farm, and the land, and collects money in the village, but the family can afford passage for only one of the seven children; the parents take their youngest son, Mehmet Ali, leaving the other six behind³. The Swiss Films catalog describes the boy as the brightest of the couple's children¹.

Traveling via Istanbul, the three go as stowaways on a container ship to Naples³. A Swiss truck driver promises to take them directly into Switzerland, but the attempt fails at the customs control in Chiasso⁵. In Milan the family falls into the hands of smugglers, who drive them with a larger group of asylum seekers into the mountains and send them across the green border on foot, despite snowfall and cold and without a local guide⁵. Father and son are separated from Meryem, and the journey ends in death and mourning³.

The real incident

Koller based the film on a newspaper report of 15 October 1988: a seven-year-old Turkish boy traveling on foot with his parents toward Switzerland had died at the Splügen Pass during the night, of exhaustion and hypothermia⁵. According to the father's later account, the smugglers had told the group of twelve people they were at 1,500 meters and that the border lay at 2,500 meters, over the pass; the group was sent on without a guide as darkness, wind, and snowfall set in⁶. The father carried the freezing boy in his arms over the pass; on the far side the child was no longer breathing, and a driver who finally stopped rushed him to a hospital, where he was declared dead⁶. Koller said he set out to reconstruct the migrants' route from the Anatolian highlands to the high Alps as authentically as possible⁵.

Production and reception

The film was photographed by Elemér Ragályi³. Sources disagree on the composer: filmportal.de credits Terje Rypdal, while the Giffoni festival archive and a Swiss distributor credit Jan Garbarek³^•⁷. Runtime listings also vary, from 100 minutes in the Swiss Films catalog to 110 minutes in the German filmportal record¹^•³.

Critical response. Reviewers generally praised the film's restraint. The Deseret News wrote that Koller steers clear of the obvious sentimental route, telling the story in a tough, matter-of-fact manner filled with day-to-day details, which makes the film more realistic and harrowing⁸. Time Out called it a moving, resolutely unglamorous drama whose strength lies in the central characterizations, while finding the depictions of the Swiss less satisfactory⁹. Roger Ebert placed the film in the context of a pattern repeated tens of thousands of times each year, as poor workers from southern countries travel north hoping for better jobs¹⁰. Some critics disputed the Oscar itself: the Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan argued the film beat the favored Cyrano de Bergerac and The Nasty Girl mainly by making academy voters tear up¹¹.

The Oscar

The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film was presented on 26 March 1991. Swiss radio later described the win as a sensation: the heavy favorite had been Cyrano de Bergerac, with Gérard Depardieu in the lead, which already held many European prizes and a large publicity campaign⁶. Koller had premiered the film at Locarno the previous August, where, by his own account, 95 percent of the reviews were very positive and the film took the Bronze Leopard¹². The film continued to circulate at festivals for decades afterward, with selections including Shanghai (2009), Haifa (2013), Guadalajara (2016), and Locarno (2016)¹.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026