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SIAMO ITALIANI

By Alexander J. SEILER, Rob GNANT

DSCHOINT VENTSCHR FILMPRODUKTION - as PROD

Documentary - Completed 1964

The documentary from 1964 marks the beginning of the New Swiss Cinema. For the first time, the focus is on migrants: Italian workers who were perceived as a “problem” in Switzerland at the time.

- Year of production
- 1964
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- SWITZERLAND
- Languages
- SWISS-GERMAN, ITALIAN
- Duration
- 79 mn
- Director(s)
- Alexander J. SEILER, Rob GNANT
- Writer(s)
- Alexander J. SEILER, June KOVACH, Rob GNANT, June KOVACH
- Producer(s)
- Alexander J. SEILER, Rob GNANT
- Synopsis
- In their documentary, Seiler, Gnant and Kovach seek to meet the people who were perceived and discussed as a «problem» in Switzerland in the 1960s and 1970s: the Italian workforce. The film begins with a sanitary investigation at the border; man becomes a commodity – human beings as mass goods – whose only purpose is to function smoothly in the working process and to be administered as easily as possible. Then the authors show Seiler the life of the «foreign workers» in Switzerland in its most important aspects: the working conditions, the housing conditions, the forbidden family reunifications, the bleak Sundays, the hard-heartedness of the locals, the bureaucracy. «We did not come as sociologists or welfare workers, but as investigators without restriction, and without exception we seem to be the first Swiss who were not only interested in certain aspects of our protagonists lives, but in themselves and everything they had to say.»