«Cerchiamo per subito operai, offriamo...»

Happy New Year!

By now, most of you have hopefully recovered from the festivities and you have all had a good start to the new year! We would like to welcome you to 2023 with a new film recommendation. The last film we presented was «Bäckerei Zürrer» by Kurt Früh. Next we would like to introduce you to the film «Cerchiamo per subito operai, offriamo...» - in Englisch: "Workers wanted, we offer…". A film by the director, screenwriter and journalist Villi Herman.

About «Cerchiamo per subito operai, offriamo...»:

In the 1970s, thousands of workers set off at dawn every day - mainly southern Italians who had emigrated to Lombardy: They often stand in traffic jams for hours to get to the factories in Ticino, which are only a few kilometres away. Late at night they return to the cramped barracks on the other side of the border.

«Cerchiamo per subito operai, offriamo...» is an alarming and deeply activist film. And therefore also of great importance for my new project. It sheds light on a very specific part of labour migration to Switzerland, namely the life of border crossers. And shows how people, most of whom are also strangers in their place of residence, go abroad to work. A life between worlds, the conditions of which Villi Hermann denounces with his film. And that's why the film is important to me not only as a contemporary document, but also personally as an inspiration, because even when I saw the film in the 70s it grabbed me.

- Samir

Those who are not at home in the border region, like Villi Hermann, are hardly ever confronted with the problems of the frontalieri. «Cerchiamo...» is therefore an important and necessary document. It is often assumed that the frontier workers are identical with the native population of the Italian border villages.

In reality, the majority are double migrants: Sicilians, Turks, Yugoslavs who want to take their families with them but have not been granted a residence permit in Switzerland. They represent a cheap, easily renewable labour potential for many companies that have relocated their less rationalised firms to southern Ticino. Within the labour force, cross-border workers are on the lowest rung of the disadvantaged, since they have no rights whatsoever, no infrastructure at home, poor conditions at work. Two countries want to tax them. Their meagre free time is eaten up by the long commute to work. Most of the "frontalieri" leave at 5 am and return home at 8 pm.

- Beatrice Leuthold, Tages-Anzeiger