Children of the Open Road

Children of the Open Road (1992)

Kinder der Landstrasse

In 1939, after barely escaping the Nazis, a Gypsy family returns to Switzerland only to be torn apart by racial persecution in the benign guise of children's welfare. This fictionalized story of Jana, an eight-year-old Gypsy girl snatched from her parents and consigned to a life of orphanages and bleak foster homes, is based on a little-known chapter of Swiss history: From 1926 to 1972, the state-supported Pro Juventute, a children's aid foundation, forcibly removed some 700 Gypsy children from their families, in order to sever the ties with their culture and assimilate them to a "better way of life." The underlying aim was to preempt a new generation's caravans from following their nomadic traditions along Switzerland's country lanes.

Date of release
1992-01-01
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (2)
Runtime
1h 57m
Genres
History, Drama
Director
Urs Egger

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Germany, Switzerland, and Austria

Children of the Open Road is a Swiss feature/drama film that was produced in 1992. Its topic is the Kinder der Landstrasse foundation, active between 1926 and 1973, which controversially attempted to assimilate the itinerant Yeniche population of Switzerland by forcibly moving their children to foster homes or orphanages. The historical topic is presented in fictionalized account.

Production

The film was produced by Lichtblick Film - und Fernsehproduktion, Panorama Films, Schweizer Fernsehen (SRF), Wega Film and Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) in 1992 on locations in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. As of 1992, Kinder der Landstrasse was the most expensive Swiss film production. It was also the first official co-production of the three German-speaking countries Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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