Güneşe Yolculuk

Mehmet, a recent arrival to the teeming city, is fortunate. He has a shared room, a possible girlfriend, and a neat job as a diviner for Istanbul’s municipal water system. He meets Berzan, a street music vendor familiar with the metropolis, and his moral education begins. Berzan is a Kurd, harassed by the authorities, and Mehmet’s friendship with him combined with his own “dark skin” puts Mehmet at extreme risk. Yeşim Ustaoğlu, an architect turned filmmaker, takes her characters on a journey east out of Istanbul into a ravishing and war-ravaged landscape close to the Iraqi border. Hotly debated when first released in Turkey, Journey to the Sun may be a story of sanctioned persecution, but it is also the chronicle of a remarkable friendship as well as a pilgrimage into the unknown. (Film Society of Lincoln Center) Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s sophomore feature Journey to the Sun received the Blue Angel Award at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1999.