Welcome Review

Immigration was one of the great issues of the 2000s, and one of the hardest to dramatise successfully. The emotive weight of the subject and the sense that migrants' stories consisted of unasked and probably unanswerable questions made meaningful engagement difficult. Director Philippe Lioret's drama avoids these pitfalls by telling the story of a Kurdish refugee from the perspective of an unremarkable middle-aged Frenchman. Welcome, which generated controversy and acclaim in equal measure when it was released in France in early 2009, is an understated attempt to confront engrained assumptions about asylum seekers, and it does so by accepting that for most of us in the West, the experience will always be alien.

Bilal (Firat Ayverdi) is the 17-year-old Kurd who, as the film begins, has already travelled 4,000 kilometres from Iraq to Calais in an attempt to reach his girlfriend Mina (Derya Ayverdi) in London. Stranded in Calais with hundreds of other refugees all seeking entry to the UK, Bilal pays a handler and attempts to join the stowaways on a Dover-bound truck. He's caught and sent back to a detention centre in Calais. After his epic, life threatening trek across Europe, the future looks as bleak as the final 20 kilometre stretch of sea separating him from Mina and a new life in Britain

Yet Bilal's plight is only half the story. Simon (Vincent Lindon) is a middle-aged swimming instructor about to get divorced from his wife Marion (Audrey Dana), who helps run a refugees' soup kitchen. When Bilal becomes a regular at Simon's pool, first asking to use the showers and then requesting swimming lessons, it becomes clear that the boy has a plan: to swim his way to England. Simon starts training Bilal and offers him a place to stay - first to impress Marion, but then for genuinely altruistic reasons. It's a risky enterprise for both parties. It takes 12 hours to swim the freezing Channel, and for Simon aiding an illegal immigrant is punishable by law.