E5 THE GUESTWORKERS HIGHWAY

The Working Class Goes Home

Although this ‘lost’ film by Tuncel Kurtiz was always known to exist, it was only very recently that a print was found. So when it premiered last year at the Which Human Rights? Film Festival in Istanbul, the auditorium was full to overflowing and the audience rapturous in its response. A road documentary of sorts, the film focuses on the long and torturous journey made by Turkish “gastarbeiter” when returning from Germany to the homeland on annual leave.

The original title of the documentary Kurtiz made for the Swedish public broadcaster, SVT, in1978 was Gastarbeiterstrasse, or Guest Worker Street… But as the film itself makes clear, the route also became notorious as Death Road by virtue of the many fatal accidents that took place along the way particularly during the summer months.

The history of the E-5 Highway is closely allied to the history of labor migration to Europe… Districts of Berlin such as Kreuzberg, Wedding and Neukölln, which had been home in the past to German workers, were now overtaken by “guest workers”. Most of them saw the families they had left behind twice a year at most, at New Year and/or for the summer holidays. And that meant enduring the journey back home on the E5.

The film begins in a used car market, where workers flock to buy wheels for the journey, or to change their old cars for something more family-sized, and then follows the long trip back to Turkey in newly acquired second, third or even fourth-hand vehicles. The road isn’t just long; it is dangerous too, particularly on the stretches leading through Yugoslavia and Turkey. Indeed, we are shown plenty of wreckage as testimony to this…

While the German middle and upper classes travel down to the Spanish coast for their summer holidays, these people don’t go to Mallorca to spend their holidays there; they turn the wheel hard in the direction of Yugoslavia, Turkey and Greece.

Kurtiz paints a somber portrait of the working class heading not to heaven, but back to the homeland.

Necati Sönmez

Sweden Turkey
60''
1978

Director
Tuncel Kurtiz

Festivals
20th Festival on Wheels
Back on the Road with Tuncel Kurtiz