The poster for "Welcome"

Talk of the town this week is the new film by Philippe Lioret called 'Welcome', which looks at the human drama unfolding at the northern port of Calais. That is where hundreds of migrants from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere gather with the purpose of secretly crossing the Channel to England in the back of lorries. They are generally thwarted in their endeavours, because security is tight, but enough evidently do make it over to keep hopes alive. In the meantime the migrants live rough in makeshift camps on the outskirts of Calais, subsisting on hand-outs from charity and looked on with a certain resentment by many locals.

Periodically French government ministers feel compelled to promise more substantial shelter -- but this immediately triggers howls of protest from the right-wing press in Britain. Across the Channel, there is a paranoid fixation that France is going to create a new 'Sangatte' -- this being the name of the holding centre for migrants that became a kind of operational HQ for the people-smugglers. Sangatte was closed in 2002 by the then interior minister -- one Nicolas Sarkozy -- but the same humanitarian arguments that led to its creation in the first place (i.e. the crying disgrace of hundreds of men living under tarpaulin) continue to apply today.

This is the backdrop to the film, which is about how a swimming instructor -- played by the very watchable Vincent Lindon -- befriends a young Kurd who wants to swim across to England to be with his girlfriend. Unlike so many French films, 'Welcome' is well-constructed and has enough dramatic tension to keep the viewer engaged. It also sheds much-needed light on the plight of so many stranded migrants, living in abject misery on one side of the Channel with the white cliffs of their eldorado visible just 20 miles away.

However I certainly do not consider it a great film -- not least because the moral message is so unsubtle. Lioret has openly compared the attitude of police and some locals towards the migrants with those of the French population towards Jews during World War II. Specifically his film targets a law, which is indeed on the statute books, that makes it a criminal offence to give aid to illegal immigrants. In the film, the Vincent Lindon character is prosecuted because he puts the Kurd up in his flat.

But I am not convinced. That law is obviously not intended to stop people making humanitarian gestures towards the migrants, but to stop the lucrative trade run by the so-called 'passeurs' -- the ones who organise the clandestine migrations. Though he claims to be portraying events which have indeed been documented, Lioret has not produced evidence that the law has been used against the compassion of ordinary citizens. One case is often evoked of a woman who was held for questioning after she re-charged the mobile phones of some migrants -- but surely this could have been part of a legitimate investigation into people-smuggling. There is an interesting discussion on this at the following blog at Le Monde. http://moreas.blog.lemonde.fr/2009/03/14/migrants-de-calais-delit-d’assistance/">http://moreas.blog.lemonde.fr/2009/03/14/migrants-de-calais-delit-d’assistance/