Welcome Europe (2006)

Directed by: Bruno Ulmer | 90 minutes | documentary

“We thought we would find paradise here, but that’s not true. Hell we have found.” This statement by one of the main characters of ‘Welcome Europe’ summarizes the content of the documentary well. The portrayed young illegal immigrants find out the hard way that the ‘Fortress Europe’ has multiple methods of defense or exclusion. It is not enough to illegally cross borders and walk around Amsterdam, Paris or Berlin. Without the right papers, you will not gain access to the normal labor market with a work permit, and you will not gain access to collective facilities, such as regular healthcare.

In ‘Welcome Europe’ some people dream of work, a relationship, children. To make ends meet, however, they have few choices except gay prostitution, petty theft and drug dealing. Life for these immigrants is a long survival journey without the certainty that afterwards a warm bed and bath is waiting. Eating and personal hygiene – showering and shaving – is problematic. The hungry Kurd Mehmet eats his evening meal with utmost concentration at a shelter for illegal immigrants; he scrapes off the last remnants of a piece of foil. In a scene with Moroccan Allal, who is only sixteen, there is even dirt on the camera lens. As if poor food and poor hygiene were not enough for an unhealthy lifestyle, everyone smokes almost continuously. One immigrant notes that he lacks tenderness.

The life of these immigrants is reminiscent of life in the state of nature according to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. The director Bruno Ulmer pays little attention to the cities in which he has shot. ‘Welcome Europe’ consists largely of ‘close ups’ of the immigrants in color and in hard, deliberately overexposed, black and white. Ulmer wants to tell the story at the bottom of the rich European societies. Unfortunately, the individual stories are too similar. Identifying with one person’s misery is easier than with eight. The reflex in anonymous misery is rather to deposit money into the account of an aid organization.