This paper delves into two fiction films, I Saw the Sun (Güne?i Gördüm) (2009) and The Storm (F?rt?na/Bahoz) (2008), as vantage points for a discussion about the contemporary representations of Kurds and the Kurdish issue in cinema. Both films narrate stories of displacement, war, and the Kurdish experience yet with drastically divergent undercurrents about Kurds, the Kurdish issue, and the Turkish state at large. While I Saw the Sun revolves around a rural family and the humanitarian tragedies they face before and after migrating to Istanbul, The Storm is about the political socialization of a Kurdish teenager in Istanbul. In I Saw the Sun, Kurdish individuals are long-suffering yet obedient subjects, who submit to a Turkish state that guarantees their security. In The Storm, on the other hand, the protagonist runs into trouble with the same state; he becomes a self-declared revolutionary and joins the Kurdish guerilla forces. Second, appearing in movie theatres within only a few months of each other, the two films received markedly different responses. Within a few weeks of its release, I Saw the Sun was seen by two and a half million moviegoers. Many critics celebrated both the film and its director for his courage to narrate such a story. The Storm, on the other hand, was seen by fewer than one hundred thousand moviegoers in part due to a lack of exposure and critical praise. Except for a few, critics largely ignored it, while the selection committees of the prominent national film festivals excluded the film from their programs. In this paper, I explain why and how certain representations of the Kurdish issue and Kurdishness gain currency while others are ignored. In other words, I hope to explore “the rules of discursive formation” that circumscribe the articulations of Kurdishness and lead to the recurrence of certain representations rather than others (Foucault 1972). An analysis of the previously mentioned films reveals these pathways of circulation, situates the category of Kurdishness within the metadiscursive conditions of Turkish nationalism and neoliberal multiculturalism, and evinces the rules of the discursive formation about Kurds, which seem lately to be modified but are in fact continuous with existing state ideologies. The dismissal of the ethno-political character of the Kurdish issue is a stark continuity between earlier and current discursive formations about Kurds, a continuity, which facilitates I Saw the Sun’s availability, while it decreases The Storm’s circulation in film circles.