Özgür Yaren, visiting scholar in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, is assistant professor in film and TV at Faculty of Fine Arts, YYU Van, Turkey.

(Süru). The Herd has a simple premise that it utilizes to devastating effect: the economic survival of a Kurdish family depends on its herd of sheep. The film follows the driving of the herd; the constant threats to the livestock and the family serve both as ethnographic documentary and existential (and political) parable. Explaining to an interviewer about his use of metaphor and allegory to express himself politically in his films, Güney declared that the subject of The Herd was the history of the Kurds. At the same time, he noted, the film was made in Turkish; any public use of the Kurdish language was illegal at the time.