Children of the Open Road
Kinder der Landstrasse
Children of the Open Road at FMovies. 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.
- Genre: History, Drama
- Country: Germany, Austria, Switzerland
- Director: Urs Egger
- Cast: Jasmin Tabatabai, Andrea Eckert, Hans-Peter Korff, Nina Petri, Wolf-Dietrich Berg, Herbert Leiser, Mathias Gnädinger, Noemi Steuer, Johanna Karl-Lory,