At the Locarno Film Festival, Swiss director Samir has presented his new feature, out of competition. The Miraculous Transformation of the Working Class Into Foreigners [+leggi anche:
intervista: Samir
scheda film] is a documentary based on the immigration of mainly Italian workers to Switzerland in the 1960s. We talked to the director about his sources, and his visual and thematic approach.

Cineuropa: How did you find your protagonists?
Samir: Personal acquaintances have led to more and more connections. I was introduced to people through migrant organisations or trade unions. Initially, I had a version lasting four-and-a-half hours, and I quickly realised that I could have spoken to many more people. In the end, I had to limit myself, so I also focused on German-speaking Switzerland.

If you look at films about migration that have been made in the meantime, what would you say you wanted to add with your doc?
I don't want to close any gaps with the help of individual events, but I have tried to place the individual dramatic events in a historical context. For example, the term Überfremdung [lit. “over-alienation”] didn't just get plucked out of the air. It was invented by an obscure author at the beginning of the 20th century and was then first used as a defamatory term by the Swiss fascists. It then became socially acceptable, and owing to pressure from reactionary political movements, the term was subsequently used in official politics as a fighting term. A movie cannot replace the class analysis of a book, or in-depth historical studies or analyses. But a film can create playful and emotional connections to bring people's stories closer to other people, and embed them in the history of a country. That is the aim of this work.

Your movie consists of extensive archive material. Where did it come from?
The Swiss Television archive has processed its material in an exemplary manner, and it is openly accessible digitally. I was amazed at how often the topic was covered by broadcasters. However, the presentation and focus have changed over time. In the beginning, they only reproduced the state's announcement; later, at the end of the 1960s, an ironic undertone was mixed in. In the 1970s, there were harsh and unembellished analyses of the situation. However, from the 1990s onwards, the trend shifted back towards racist partisanship. Xenophobic slogans are repeated, perhaps initially in a supposedly naïve manner, and their defamatory message is taken for granted. As a result, the media have become vehicles for the racist protagonists in politics.

You say in the film that police files were destroyed over time. Is there any written autobiographical material from the time?
Firstly, many kilometres’ worth of files on migrant families were simply destroyed by the immigration police in a number of cantons. Historian Benjamin Khan has published an important work on this. But I'm still waiting for this scandal to be picked up by the media. Secondly, there are countless books by migrant workers in which they themselves describe their existence. Many of them are self-published. These works were rarely, if ever, covered in the feature pages of the bourgeois newspapers. In recent years, the topic has been taken up occasionally, mostly in connection with political initiatives on the regulation of foreign labour. But the people themselves still hardly get a chance to speak. That was one more reason to give some of them a voice in my film.

Could you describe the aesthetic concept of the film?
It was about this: why is someone from Baghdad making a film about Italian migration? We used the animations as a central theme. I wanted to contrast the archive material with a reference to the present. It was a nice coincidence that the old barracks were being occupied by a collective at the same time as the film was being shot in Biel. So we were able to talk to them about why the hotplates of the former seasonal workers are still preserved. And as a former typographer, I used fonts to structure the film thematically with the help of animated chapters.