Swiss Director’s ‘Journey of Hope’ Leads to Oscar : Movies: Xavier Koller’s film about a Turkish family escaping to Europe has brought him new acclaim and an Academy Award.

The least publicized of the five Oscar nominees for best foreign-language film, “Journey of Hope,” proved to be the one to beat. It tells of a group of Turks, one family in particular, and its struggle to enter Switzerland any way it can. A film of harrowing emotional impact and sharply critical political and economic implications, it is the work of Zurich, Switzerland-based Xavier Koller, a writer-director heretofore unfamiliar in America, although since 1973 he has made four theatrical features and a number of movies for Swiss TV. The film opens in Los Angeles today.

“I feel like a cloud with trousers,” Koller said after “Journey of Hope” won the Oscar, which many observers believed would go to the long-running, widely acclaimed “Cyrano de Bergerac.”

Koller was on his way to Paris in October, 1988, to prepare for his next picture when a brief item in a Swiss newspaper caught his attention--and held it fast. “I wasn’t able to focus on my real work,” Koller recalled in an interview at his Westwood hotel while in town for the Academy Awards. “I woke up at 4 a.m. and knew I had to do it.”

Koller soon completed a 25-page handwritten treatment, and after research upon his return to Switzerland, he worked out a 13-page synopsis to show producers and TV stations. When he attended the Istanbul Film Festival in April, 1989, he discovered the Turkish collaborator he knew he would need, Feride Cicekoglu, who had written the marvelous (but still unreleased) “Don’t Let Them Shoot at the Kite,” which last year was Turkey’s official entry for the Oscars.

Although the heart of the matter in “Journey of Hope” is a celebration of family solidarity, and a loving father-and-son relationship in particular, it inevitably calls attention to the plight of countless Middle Easterners, driven to leave their homelands for economic and political reasons, only to receive considerably less than warm welcomes from European countries, a situation Koller sees as worsening in light of the Persian Gulf War.

As blunt as the film is in these matters, Koller admitted that in return for being able to shoot in Turkey, he avoided identifying the family as Kurds when he learned from Cicekoglu and Goren Serif, who directed the still-banned “Yol” for the then-imprisoned Yilmaz Guney, that this would endanger the Turkish cast and crew. He also said he based his film on a newspaper account of one family’s journey and that other immigrant families’ stories are addressed in his film too--but the central story is based on real life.

For the father, Koller cast Necmettin Cobanoglu, featured in “Yol,” and for the mother, Nur Serer, the star of “Don’t Let Them Shoot at the Kite.” To play their small son, Koller chose a remarkable child actor, Emin Sivas, whom he discovered through an Istanbul casting agency. Burly Swiss star Mathias Gnadinger plays a kindly truck driver who gives the family a lift through Italy. Shooting took place in the fall of 1989 in Turkey, Italy and a wintry Switzerland over an arduous 10-week period.

“Last August, the film premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, and 95% of the reviews were very positive,” said Koller, who took the festival’s top prize, the Bronze Leopard. “There was a really outstanding reaction from the audience; you could really feel people becoming emotional about it. There were 3,000 people crowded in this gymnasium. The colder it got on the screen, the hotter it got in the theater!”

Yet Koller, who cannot say enough for the dedication of his cast and crew, said that in Switzerland the film “has not at all been a blockbuster” but that this is typical for serious Swiss films. “We had limited finances to advertise the film, which is always the case,” he said, “but I think with this film there was another reason: Maybe it hit a little too close to home.”

“Journey of Hope” is very personal for Koller, a slight, dark-haired man of 47 who speaks English with ease. “I come from a very low social level,” he said.

“My father wanted to become a carpenter but could not afford to pay for an apprenticeship. Like the father in my film, he wanted a better life for his son and insisted that I learn a trade. That is why I spent four years learning to be a precision toolmaker when I wanted to join the circus or become an actor. My father said, ‘You are a clown already. Please learn a proper profession. When you’ve got that, I’ve done my duty.’ After I finished my four-year apprenticeship, I went to acting school right away.

“I hated that apprenticeship most of the time, but later I learned to appreciate it. I realized how precise things must be on the screen, how you must fight all the way through to the very end to bring exactly the feelings you want to the screen.”

Koller attributes his pared-down film approach to the influence of the minimalism of the Samuel Beckett plays he became acquainted with in acting school and also to the year (1986-87) he spent in Santa Monica while his wife was studying at the Gemological Institute of America.

“I needed some kind of recycling after each film, and this was the situation when we came to Santa Monica,” he said. “I went to the academy and read scripts. I love Frank Capra films, and Kurosawa is very important to me, especially ‘Rashomon,’ with its four different points of view. All good books and films influence you anyway.

“You want to give a story a certain beat. We’re always a little too slow in Europe; we try to do too many things at the same time. My stay here was very important because I went to the cinema almost every day. I try to follow the inner lives of my characters and then try to find ways to express them visually--not the other way around. I try to minimize the amount of information needed. Film, I think, is like a piece of music; it should have the structure of a symphony.”

Currently, Koller is preparing the film he dropped in favor of “Journey of Hope.” It is based on the novel “Eclipse of the Moon” by the late Friedrich Duerrenmatt. “It is the basic story of ‘The Visit,’ which he changed when he made it into a play,” he said. “A guy comes back to his home rather than a woman, like in the play, and while people kill for money, it is not a story of revenge but of passion and love. It must be made with an international cast, or I won’t do it. It will be like a big, strong painting. It will help blow the borders of Switzerland.”

That’s something Koller might like to do himself. Whereas he has come to international acclaim with a film about people striving to get into Switzerland, he himself is not at all averse to leaving it. “It is important to go back to your roots to figure out who you are,” he said. “But Switzerland is also a very good country to leave, for otherwise your mind narrows.”