Classe d'accueil

Fifteen adolescents from Bosnia, Kurdistan, Portugal and Brazil are being taught French at a “reception class”. Either escaping from a war-torn country, or simply joining parents who have long been in Switzerland as “seasonal workers” the young people have one thing in common: their idealisation of the host country as a “promised Land”. In their privileged relationship with the teacher they forget that for them the future remains unpromising – repatriation in the case of the Bosnian refugees, dead-end jobs for the others. In their search for a new identity, the young people fail to realise that the host country seems to have lost its own, and to have lost sight of the pluralism and diversity which are at the very roots of the Helvetic Confederation.