Miscellaneous Swiss filmmaker Samir fights against oblivion

The new documentary by Zurich filmmaker Samir looks at a repressed part of Swiss history: migration from neighboring countries to the south in the post-war period.

The wording is drastic: "Italians not wanted!". This notice was found in many housing advertisements in Swiss newspapers in the post-war period. Hardly anyone remembers it today. Zurich filmmaker Samir wants to change that with his new work "The miraculous transformation of the working class into foreigners".

The economic boom came after the Second World War. In order to participate in it, Switzerland needed workers. And they came - mainly from Italy. They were tolerated, but not wanted, as the example of the housing advertisements shows. On the one hand, Italians made a decisive contribution to Switzerland's wealth in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; on the other hand, they lived in secluded seasonal shacks. The film calls this "silent apartheid".

"I am part of this story"

During this time, Samir, still a child at the time, immigrated from Iraq with his family. He soon met Italian children. That was over 60 years ago and during the Covid pandemic, Samir found time to research the history of migration in Switzerland, as he said in an interview with "Work", the newspaper of the trade union Unia. "I realized: I am part of this history."

That's why he wanted to appear in his film himself. So Samir reached into his bag of tricks: He can now be seen as an avatar. The idea of a virtual mirror image may be a tempting one, but it is not convincing here. His alter ego and the other characters seem awkward, like foreign bodies, they interrupt the rhythm of the movie and are simply unnecessary.

Out of the field of vision

The 69-year-old director and producer criticizes the fact that many middle-class Swiss still have no contact with migrants. They are outside their field of vision, says Samir in the interview. "Politicians and business leaders have no idea about their lives. And this ignorance, this declassification of a large section of this country, that shocks me."

That's why the documentary goes beyond the post-war period and continues into the present day: the Schwarzenbach Initiative, the work of the trade unions, the oil crisis, mass redundancies, the rise of feminism, the "new" foreigners and much more.

"The others are all of us"

The work operates in two parallel arenas. On the one hand, Samir wants to fight against forgetting and repressing the past, while on the other, he draws parallels with today. The migrants would experience the same discrimination as the people from Italy back then. Nevertheless, he is not without hope, as he said in the interview: "My film also shows that we can change that. These others are always all of us. I hope that I contribute to understanding that collective understanding is a primal human thing to bring about improvements."

The film is long - over two hours -, dense and full of dialog. This is not to its detriment. The structure is convincing and the balance between facts and emotions is right. Numerous people have their say and countless film clips document what is said. The film is both a consistent history lesson and a multi-volume encyclopedia that can be referred to again and again.