Welcome - The Film

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France hails film drama of refugee's desperate swim across the Channel

The tale of a young Kurdish immigrant's all-or-nothing bid to enter Britain is set to storm French cinemas

* Jason Burke
* The Observer, Sunday 8 March 2009


On the beach is a middle-aged Frenchman and a Kurdish teenager. In the distance a ferry sits on the horizon and beyond it, on the other side of the Channel, is England. The older man, a swimming instructor at Calais's municipal pool, dreams of winning back his wife, a charity worker who has tired of him. His young friend dreams of reaching the UK, joining his girlfriend and playing for Manchester United. The refugee walks into the foaming, freezing, grey waters and starts swimming.

The scene is from the film Welcome, opening in French cinemas this week. The work of director Philippe Lioret, it portrays with brutal honesty the lives of refugees trying to reach the UK from France - the cold, hunger, casual violence from police and the risks run by some to help them. Welcome has already won critical acclaim, playing to packed cinemas in pre-release screenings, and seems certain to become an art-house hit.

Like The Class, a hard-hitting depiction of life in an inner-city school released last year, and La Haine, the cult film that brought the plight of young immigrants in France's deprived suburbs to global attention in 1995, Welcome is another example of gritty French cinema that will provoke a storm of controversy. To win back the affections of his liberal wife, the swimming instructor - played by one of France's best-known highbrow actors, Vincent Lindon - prepares his Kurdish protege for a cross-Channel endurance test in which the most difficult obstacle will be evading immigration officials when he reaches the English shore.

In Calais, where Welcome was filmed and set, audiences cheered at the preview screenings. "It's the most beautiful and most upsetting film I have ever seen," said Laure Ducastel, 31, a local resident. "It shows how the refugees and the charity workers are heroes and what dirty work the French state does to make their lives a misery."

In one scene, the swimming instructor is raided by French police and charged with helping illegal immigrants. Lioret, who conducted months of field research before filming, said that he "toned down" rather than exaggerated what he found in Calais and elsewhere. "We decided to make the film when we heard that refugees had really tried to swim across."

He said the constant raids and arrests were "like something out of the 1940s ... I just wanted to show that a foreigner is like you or me," said Lioret, who has said he chose to set the drama in Calais because it resembled "our version of the Mexican border".more