The young Turkish teacher Emre Aydın has been appointed by the government to go teach at a school in an impoverished village in Şanlıurfa. He arrives in the village at the beginning of the school year. In the classroom, the children can’t speak Turkish, and the teacher can’t speak Kurdish.

Orhan Eskiköy and Özgür Doğan’s influential documentary is quietly defiant and playfully political. Observing the nation-building rituals in a primary school where Kurdish children constitute the majority, On the Way to School opens up a debate on the importance of education in mother tongue.