Welcome
(Philippe Lioret): Vincent Lindon, Firat Ayverdi, Audrey Dana, Derya Ayverdi, Thierry Godard
Running time: 110 minutes
Rating: 3.5/5 (15A)

The title of Philippe Lioret's engrossing Welcome is a sarcastic sneer at French and British immigration control. He paints the port of Calais as a police state, the final frontier where hundreds of hopefuls who want to cross the channel are treated like second-class humans.

Bilal (Firat Ayverdi) is one such kid. He's 17, a Kurd, and has walked all the way from Iraq fuelled by naïve optimism. He joins the food queues lined with sad faces, and risks his life in the back of a truck to cross the channel. Caught, he's sent back, and decides instead to swim it.

Lioret knows the only surefire way of breaking down indifference is to convey the sheer lengths of desperation immigrants will go to for a new life. Bilal goes to swimming coach Simon (Vincent Lindon), a man, like the rest of France, too wrapped in his own affairs to take notice of anybody else. Lindon, with a head like a lizard, is an actor with a heavy old soul. He is perfect casting for a man who is awakening slowly to the tragedy that is about to unfold. This is a call to arms but it is told with a suppressed anger. It is engrossing, and gently urgent, but Lioret allows the emotional punch to slip out of his grasp.