The Shelter

Fernand Melgar / Switzerland / 2014 / International Premiere / 101 min.

synopsis

Nervousness, stress and bursts of violence in front of a bunker in the Swiss town of Lausanne, where every night in winter homeless people – most of them immigrants – undergo selection. The old bunker is an emergency shelter, but the number of people looking for a bed is more than the facility can handle. First women and children, the aged and handicapped, then the men. All of the participants in this ritual are under mental pressure. Shot in a combination of static long shots and close-ups of the arguing people, the film looks at the microcosm of stories of people caught in a vicious bureaucratic circle.

DETAIL:
“I’ve seen people arrive, handsome like you. After five months, when they didn’t find work... human decline... people’s morals deteriorate... at some point, before getting to that stage, go back home.”

biography

Fernand Melgar (1961) focuses on the situation of immigrants in Switzerland, exploring their status and the nature of the bureaucratic system by looking at particular institutions: in The Fortress (La Fortresse, 2008), which won the Golden Leopard in Locarno, it was a center for asylum-seekers, and in Special Flight (Le Vol spécial, 2011) it was a detention facility. Both films were shown at the One World Film Festival in Prague.