Watch Journey of Hope

Can hope be found on a postcard? That is what a Kurdish family living on a farm in Turkey dreams about after looking at a postcard: desire for a better quality of life in Switzerland. They will sell all their possessions, including the farm, to search for the land of milk and honey. The adventures they experience along the way will make the journey of hope seem like a pipe dream.

This is a timely movie because it illustrates a real-life scenario: the plight of the Kurds in the Middle East, which started in the late 80s as they emigrate to other countries, escaping political turmoil and bad economic conditions. That same scenario is still taking place today, just as it did more than 20 years ago, with the instability in the Middle East. That fact makes the movie timely.

Husband and wife Haydar and Meryam take their youngest child, Mustafa, along for the trip. They are smuggled inside the cargo hold of a ship sailing for Italy. Once there, a kindly truck driver shows compassion and takes them to the Swiss border. But border guards will not allow the family to cross, sending them to Milan, where they meet a group of unscrupulous human smugglers who only care about money, not the value of human life. The smugglers take them to a dangerous mountain pass in the Alps, where the weather is rough, and they lose all their possessions.

Some of the people with the family, including Meryam, manage to make it safely to a small Swiss region. Haydar is reunited with Meryam some time later, but their son Mustafa, unfortunately, has frozen to death due to the hardships of the trip. So any gains achieved are overshadowed by all they lost. Was it worth it?