Documentary portrays Swiss teenagers forced to return to parents’ homeland

In his documentary My Spanish Friends, Swiss film director Adrien Bordone tells the stories of teenagers from Swiss city Biel/Bienne who were forced to move to Galicia, their Spanish parents’ homeland but which is unfamiliar territory to them. For many years cinema, literature and theatre have dealt with the thorny issue of immigration. Well before the migration crisis of the 2000s it was a focus of authors, playwrights and film directors. The documentary films The Fortress (2008) and Special Flight (2011) by Swiss director Fernand Melgar, for example, examined the lives and fates of asylum-seekers in Switzerland. Melgar, himself the son of immigrants from Spain, spent a long period in hiding in an apartment in Lausanne when he was growing up, one of the so-called “closet children” of the 1960s. His story mirrors that of the main character of The Lizard Child, the 2018 novel by the Swiss-Italian author Vincenzo Todisco, a tale about seasonal workers’ children living below the radar ...