Film tracks migrants' channel of dreams

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.

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 set the drama in Calais because it resembled "our version of the Mexican border".

The role of the 17-year-old Kurd, Bilal, was finally filled after a lengthy search for a young actor who could speak French, Kurdish and English. Played by newcomer Firat Ayverdi, Bilal decides to learn to swim across the Channel because he does not have the 500 ($1254) needed for a passeur (help in getting across illegally).

As Lioret notes, similar real-life dramas are taking place across a swathe of northern France, despite the closure of the Sangatte refugee camp on the edge of Calais in 2003.

Stringent new security measures imposed by the British Government at the Channel ports mean that refugees, once concentrated on Calais, have now dispersed far and wide.

The result is that an estimated 1500 are living in makeshift camps alongside motorways or in squats from Cherbourg to the Belgian border. In Calais, aid workers were able to find and help the migrants. Dispersed, they are much harder to assist.

One of the new camps is near the small town of Norrent-Fontes, only 110km from Paris.

Lioret said the plight of the migrants shocked him: "There was no need to dramatise anything for the film."

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