Interview: Phillipe Lioret - Welcome to the world

Published on Monday 26 October 2009 17:57

THE cinema release of Welcome could hardly be better timed. A gritty film about a young Kurdish immigrant's all-or-nothing attempt to enter Britain, it is set against the background of a migrant camp in Calais known as "the jungle", which was demolished by French police just a few weeks ago.

The film – directed by France's Phillipe Lioret, and starring one of that country's best-known actors, Vincent Lindon, alongside newcomer Firat Ayverdi – vividly portrays the lives of refugees trying to reach the UK from France. It has already won critical acclaim after pre-release screenings in Europe. In Calais, where Welcome was filmed, audiences stood up and cheered when it played.

"There was no need to dramatise anything for the film," Lioret tells me over lunch in London. "Calais is our 'Mexican border' and most people know about it, but nevertheless, to most, it is an unknown world. I knew it would take only a bit of digging into the subject to come up with a fantastic piece of drama.

"I wanted to make a film about both sides, the Frenchman and the immigrant, confronted with their emotions in the middle of this whole mess. These emotions are all part of a world where guys are fleeing from their homelands in distress, who want at all costs to reach this Eldorado, which to their eyes is England.

"Yet, after an improbable journey, they find themselves stuck in Calais, frustrated, ill-treated and humiliated, just a few kilometres from the English coastline that they can actually see from where they are."

The film, which is in both French and English, concerns Bilal (Firat Ayverdi), a 17-year-old Kurdish boy who has travelled through the Middle East and Europe to join his girlfriend Mina (Derya Ayverdi), who has freshly emigrated with her family to England. He wants to play for Manchester United. His journey is abruptly stopped when he is restrained by police on the French side of the Channel. Having decided to swim across, Bilal goes to the local swimming pool to train. There he meets Simon (Lindon, whose last film in Britain was Anything for Her – Pour Elle as it was titled in France – co-starring Diane Kruger), a swimming instructor in the midst of a divorce. To impress and win back his wife (Audrey Dana), a charity volunteer working in "the jungle", Simon decides to risk everything by taking Bilal under his wing.

Like most people from Calais, Lioret says, Simon's character isn't interested in the immigrant problem. He just puts up with it. Dana's character says in the film: "He looks away and goes back home." So when he meets Bilal, he helps him for all the wrong reasons: to impress his wife and to soothe his own bitterness at having missed a successful career as a swimming champion himself.

Bilal decides to learn to swim well enough to cross the Channel because he does not have the 500 needed for a passeur (help in getting across illegally). Simon actively helps him despite knowing that, in France, helping an illegal immigrant is punishable by law. The more he gets sucked in, the more he becomes conscious of the actual existing situation and the more he becomes attached to Bilal.

As Lioret notes, similar real-life dramas are taking place across 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 1,500 are living in makeshift camps alongside motorways or in squats from Cherbourg to the Belgian border.

"I was very aware that I was not going to create a cheap 'over-dramatisation', nor was I going to betray the truth of the refugee's experience," says Lioret. "It is definitely not a political film. It is a humane one full of small details to tell its story. I just wanted to show that a foreigner is like you or me. None of our actors were 'true' immigrants. Most of them were from Istanbul or Berlin. We searched for a long time to find a young actor who could speak French, Kurdish and English. Luckily Firat, who plays Bilal, knew how to swim as he had been in the Kurdish water-polo team. In fact, he had to unlearn how to swim for the early scenes!"

He chose Lindon – currently France's No 1 cover-boy, as seen on the latest issue of the French GQ – because, he says, he felt a connection between the two of them. Apparently they met for lunch in Paris while the story was being written, and Lindon told Lioret he'd do the film without even reading the screenplay.

"There was an exceptional chemistry between us that was bound to influence the final result," says Lioret. "Working with such good people we had few problems. Interestingly, the border police in France only gave us a few problems and the border police in the UK didn't even read the script and we had no problems with them.

"Sometimes we had to reconstruct locations but much of the time the action is real. We spent weeks following volunteers during an icy cold winter and watched them as they shared the infernal life of the refugees. It was very important for me to film right at the actual places where the action occurs. When you shoot in real places, you tell the story better.

"The situation is not simple. There is the smuggler's extortion racket, the endless persecutions from the police, the detention centres, the constant checks of trucks in which they have squeezed themselves and in which they risk their lives trying to escape detectors, heart monitors, scanners and other things. Some of them have paid about 3,000 to get, for example, from Sudan to Turkey and a further 2,500 to get to Greece hidden in a car.

"I asked them why they wanted to get to Britain. I recall one Eritrean aged 24 replying, 'Why do I want to get to Britain? Because it has to be better than everything I have seen on my way from Eritrea.' He had left his homeland seven months previously to escape compulsory military service that he said could last five or ten years."

In Lioret's film, chilling scenes show migrants hidden in trucks wrapping their heads in plastic bags to avoid heat and detectors, and running from dogs and baton-wielding police. "What most surprised us was the age of the refugees, the eldest wasn't even 25," he says. "There are even kids around 15 who set off alone on this mad journey.

"After our researching, my partner, co-writer Emmanuel Courcol, and I didn't exchange a single word during the car ride back to Paris. I know we had both decided to make the film when we heard that refugees had really tried to swim across the Channel."

Lioret is a director who has come up through the ranks working in sound, scripting and finally directing. His interest in film began early, growing up in Paris watching Cine Club on TV, which showed all the classics. When he was old enough he went to the cinema twice a week.

He has a filmography of fine, discreet, serious films, many of which have not exported, which include Tombs du ciel (1993), Mademoiselle (2001) and Je vais bien, ne t'en fais pas ("Don't Worry, I'm Fine") in 2006.

His film-making style resembles that of The Class, a hard-hitting depiction of life in an inner-city school released last year, and La Haine ("Hatred"), the cult film that brought the plight of young immigrants in France's deprived suburbs to global attention in 1995.

"What are film-makers for if not to show what life is about?" he says. "In France life is no longer like one of those 'typical' French films of the Nouvelle Vague. It is all about the whole different society that exists now in France.

"It's a good thing to discover the country we live in from another angle, one that we don't know, at the cinema. I just hope to touch the viewer sitting in the dark, helping him or her form their own opinion about it all. And hoping that the film will stay with them for a while."

&#149 Welcome is in cinemas in the UK from Friday 6 November.