Fernand Melgar has spent the last fifteen years of his directing career documenting immigration in Switzerland—especially the fraught encounters between immigrants and Swiss law and bureaucracy. (His films are available on his YouTube channel for anyone interested.) But with his latest work, À l'école des Philosophes (2018), Melgar turns his camera toward another invisible population: families with children who have physical and mental disabilities, some severe, placed in special schools. The school itself is the heart of the film.
Before following a new classroom of children with vastly different needs and abilities, Melgar focuses on the adults—parents and teachers. Each child carries a family behind them. Parents approach the school's director with fear and hope, explaining their relationship with their sons and daughters, waiting for reassurance that the year ahead will bring practical progress and growth. Then the children take over the story.
Albiana, Chloé, Louis, Kenza, and Léon seem like a class no teacher could manage—some restless and wild, others withdrawn, all carrying conditions that resist easy diagnosis, all deeply resistant to the rules that the classroom imposes. Yet the teachers' skill and patience prove stronger than any obstacle. The same holds for a young intern there to support the children and learn a trade that will demand far more than a line on her resume. Every difficulty the students face is met with care and attention. Within months, the progress is real. The worried, anxious parents from the film's opening can smile and weep watching their children do what any child does: learn and grow.
Melgar loves cinema verité. He disappears behind the camera, inviting us to believe that what we see would be exactly the same if he weren't there. Whether the children were influenced by his quiet, discreet presence—in the classrooms and in their homes—is an open question. The teachers and parents were surely aware of being filmed. But the fact that they agreed to it, that they allowed their children to be filmed, speaks to deep trust in the director's work, a trust that seems to have been repaid with remarkable honesty.
And so we like to think that the irresistible joy radiating from these children at the film's end would have been there anyway. That it is not the director's camera, but the humanity of people, that builds a community where no one is left out.