Compassion and Bureaucracy Clash in ‘A Job Well Done,’ Which Explores Immigration Through Social Workers’ Eyes

What do you do when the only way to help someone is to break the rules and the law? This clash between compassion and solidarity on the one side and the legal framework on the other is at the heart of A Job Well Done (Un travail exemplaire), the new feature blending fiction and documentary from Swiss writer-director Fred Baillif, which dives into the complexities and moral ambiguity that social workers face.

In his work, the former national basketball player and prison educator draws on his background in social work to make films that are rooted in real life and explore contradictions that people working on the tricky frontlines of social services. He previously put a spotlight on street work in Tapis rouge and life in a group home in The Fam (La Mif).

In A Job Well Done, Baillif takes us inside a double-decker bus in Geneva, where social workers welcome migrants who are looking for help, a shelter, or simply someone to talk to. On this frontline of Switzerland’s asylum system, the desire to help refugees means navigating an increasingly Kafkaesque bureaucracy.

“Behind every file, a life is told: a young woman in conflict with her family, an asylum seeker facing deportation, homeless people, a woman trying to escape violence,” reads a synopsis on the PÖFF website. “The team looks for solutions, negotiates, insists. But places are scarce, procedures run their course, and institutional responses collide with the urgency of the situations. Among colleagues, convictions clash: keep within the framework to preserve the welcome, or step outside it rather than abandon someone?”

The film will have its world premiere on Nov. 14 in the Official Selection Competition at the the 30th edition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in Estonia. Watch a trailer here.

“What interests me is the moment when a profession collides with bureaucracy without offering real alternatives,” says Baillif. “I want the viewer to experience this conflict.”

A Job Well Done grew out of immersions at AMIC, the Association of Intercultural Mediators, and at the migration and integration center Roseraie in Geneva. Baillif met professionals and the people they support. Through interviews and improvisation workshops, he developed the situations, characters and words from which the screenplay was built with Joanne Giger. The cast brings together professional actors and non-professional performers who know social work or have experience with migration. Through improvisation, the performers find their own words and reactions within a dramaturgical framework.

The cast of the Alva Film production, co-produced by Fresh Prod and RTS Radio Télévision Suisse, features Sewit Abadi, Sabbel Ceesay, Rebecca Baillif, Claudia Grob and Selam Tesfu.

Baillif talked to THR about his filmmaking process and the urgency of A Job Well Done.

Can you explain your filmmaking process and how it has fictional and real-life elements a bit?

It’s a very specific way of working. It’s not only based on what I have experienced. It’s more based on what my characters not only have experienced, but, especially in this movie, also how they feel and the way they behave in real life. So the whole work with them is to help them just be themselves as much as they can during the shoot.

And everything is scripted?

When we shoot the movie, I have a script. But the script and what’s inside every scene is always very flexible because, for me, the main idea is that they know better. They are the experts for those things because that’s what they actually do in their real life. They are social workers. They work with immigrants in their everyday life.

Do you have any examples of how actors may surprise you with their input?

There is a scene in the film about sexual mutilation, and in the script, we had the idea that [the social worker] would be very angry. That was our idea because it makes us very angry, us as white people from here.

But when we shot the scene, Sewit, our actress, told me, “No, I’m not going to be angry. I’m going to be very careful and very empathetic.” That’s an example of how I work.

I guess that also allows you to avoid the white savior lens that could come into play?

They are the experts, so I’m just going to listen to them. And coming from documentary, it’s just obvious to me that I’m not the, as you said, white savior explaining to the world what immigration is and what it is to work with immigrants. This system of directing, this concept I have developed through my films, for me is now just the way I work. I don’t think I would be able to work another way.

Was any scene in A Job Well Done particularly difficult to shoot for you or the cast?

I wanted my wife Rebecca to be in the film because she also works as a social worker. We did a scene where she’s telling her boss that she’s actually being racist in a way. This scene was very difficult for her because she wouldn’t scream, especially at an elderly person. With her African background, she respects older people a lot. So it was hard for her to do the scene, but she really did it with a lot of authenticity. It feels so real that we really enjoyed it.

The film feels really timely and addresses a topic that is causing much debate around the globe. Are there any political angles you were particularly interested in?

The idea was to talk about how we in the Western world see the “useful” and the “useless” migrants, especially in Geneva, where we have a lot of international organizations and global companies. They are big companies that come there and hire people. Those expats are the good migrants that we want, and it’s easy for them to get papers and work because we need them. And the others, we don’t need because they may not have the same background. So for me, it’s absolutely unfair.

But the focus was on the social workers, because I wanted to do something about immigration, but I didn’t want to have another movie focusing on an immigrant. Through real social workers, we can see the impact that immigration has on us who have to deal with those laws that are very restrictive.

And, of course, I also wanted to talk about how if you don’t follow the rules, then you can become an outlaw yourself. There are many examples of how you cannot follow the rules. It’s impossible when you work with people every day, and they have needs, and you have to help them. It’s impossible to just follow the rules – that is what I wanted to say because that’s what they told me about their work.