Winner of the British Film Institute award and the Golden Leopard (Grand Prize) at the Locarno Film Festival, The Herd has become a classic of world cinema. Ironically, though co-directed by Güney's collaborator Zeki Ökten, the film vies with Yol as Güney's best known and "most cinematically beautiful" (Festival of Festivals) work. (Güney wrote it in prison, and sources vary as to how much he was involved in its direction.) An austerely beautiful neorealist epic, The Herd portrays a Kurdish family from southern Anatolia who, embroiled in a blood feud with a neighboring clan, are driven by their tyrannical patriarch to auction their flock of sheep in far-off Ankara. Encountering misfortune at every turn on their journey and corruption when they finally reach their destination, the family is engulfed and betrayed by a rapidly changing modern state. Stirring and poetic, The Herd “achieves with limited resources a kind of epic grandeur and pathos.” – Adrian Turner