SECTIONS // RETROSPECTIVE: FERNAND MELGAR

Album de Famille (Family Album)

Fernand Melgar
54' / 1993 / Switzerland
French, Spanish
Spanish subtitled

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Swiss economy boomed like never before. In order to meet the demand for workers, it went looking for almost a million foreign workers in southern Europe, attracting Italians, Portuguese and Spanish in particular.
This film tells the story of the emigration of a family whose story is special because it is so similar to that of thousands of other Spanish families that came to Switzerland in the hope of building new lives for themselves.

Main Festivals & Awards

1996
North-South Media Festival, Geneva – International Labor Organization Prize for Best Film on social justice

Director's Biography

Fernand Melgar was born into a family of Spanish unionists exiled to Tangiers (Morocco). His parents smuggled him in with them when, in 1963, they emigrated to Switzerland as seasonal Labourers. In the early eighties, he cut short his business studies in order to found, together with several friends, the Cabaret Orwell in Lausanne, soon a mecca for French-speaking Switzerland’s underground culture; later, he created the internationally renowned rock music venue La Dolce Vita, also in Lausanne. After endowing the latter night spot with a programme of creative video projections, he became a self-taught, freelance film director and producer. In 1983, he began putting together various experimental films and iconoclastic reportages for television. In 1985 he joined Climage*, a collective to which he belongs to this day, and with whom he produced around a dozen documentaries, now considered as benchmarks on the topics of immigration and identity. His documentary Exit –The Right to Die has garnered several international awards, including the prestigious 2006 EBU Golden Link Award for the Best European Co-Production, and the 2006 Swiss Film Prize. Winner of the screenplay competition launched by Télévision Suisse Romande (French-speaking Switzerland’s broadcasting centre) in 2007, Melgar is currently working on his first fiction feature film, Far Behind the Mountain. He lives and works in Lausanne.

*Created in 1985, Climage groups together several individualists who have similar ideas on independent and engaged filmmaking. Today, Climage has become one of Frenchspeaking Switzerland’s most prolific producers of documentaries.

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