The Oscar-winning Journey of Hope is interesting for being a Swiss film dealing with the Turkish experience of emigration: insiders looking at outsiders looking in. Haydar, an anxious and particularly naive man, convinces his wife Meryem to leave seven of their eight children behind to join him on the journey to Switzerland from their small mountain village in southeastern Turkey. Meryem's reluctance is emblematic of the film's central irony: this is a journey that carries almost no hope, and begs a much larger question: why leave? "Are we missing anything?" Haydar's aging father asks him, as Haydar prepares to leave. "Nothing and everything," he replies. If the first part of the film suggests the problem of an abstract desire that lures families from their roots, then the harrowing adventures of the film's second half-set among people-smugglers and lost souls who no longer know in which direction lies Mecca, and of course the terrors of the frozen Alpine terrain-rather confirm it. The journey ends tragically and the fact that Xavier Koller based his film on a real incident is hardly comforting.