With Fire at Sea, director Gianfranco Rosi addresses the largest, most severe humanitarian crisis in the history of the world. The documentary is set on Lampedusa, an Italian-governed Mediterranean island that is closer to Africa’s northern shore than it is mainland Europe, a geographical fact that has made it the frontline of the current refugee emergency. Rosi’s intervention into this narrative is unforgettable, masterful and emblematic of the way that cinema can be marshalled for activism. Fire at Sea is a can’t-miss treatise on the central social issue of our time.
Rosi is subtle in his craft. Besides two title cards that serve as prologue, there is no exposition. The film features a single interview, does not trace what happens to migrants once they leave Lampedusa and does not offer suggested solutions to the crisis. There are no fiery dialogues, guilt-inducing histrionics or journalistic fact-finding. In spite of this, Fire at Sea is crushingly powerful in its rhetoric, employing a quiet, slow-burn cinematic style of argumentation.
Rosi focuses the film on Samuele Pucillo, a pre-teen native Lampedusan—a non-refugee, in other words. Samuele makes a slingshot, hunts birds with his friend, chats with his dad about the fisherman’s life, which is surely his future and goes to school. He is a normal boy, leading a normal life, even though he inhabits the rock-strewn island that doubles as the frontier of the migration fiasco. Samuele’s grandmother is also heavily featured and, while she winces daily upon hearing the migrant death count on the radio, she too is much more concerned with cooking, cleaning and calling in song requests for generations-old Sicilian hits to the local station. Everyday people with quotidian concerns, though immediately adjacent to an extraordinary global catastrophe, are the main cast members.
Fire at Sea does include scenes of the refugees. Rosi accompanies the Italian defense forces who, by helicopter and ship, perform elaborate, high-stakes rescue operations. The camera makes its way into the migrant processing center, into a community gathering within the center and into the medical practice of the Lampedusan doctor tasked with tending to the emaciated, battered and nearly-dead masses trying to cross the sea. Even in these scenes, though, the narrative leans heavily on Italians, especially on the physical implements that they use for their rescue missions, rather than the Africans and Middle Easterners passing through. The migrants are always adjacent to the film, except for the community gathering scene wherein a Nigerian offers an emotionally-resonant spoken word performance detailing the travails of the refugees’ passage to Europe.
The rhetorical effect of this patient, minimalist filmmaking is exhilarating. The viewer fills in the blanks, for instance seeing in consecutive scenes that transition from Samuele with his slingshot to a naval vessel crashing through the waves a David and Goliath metaphor of ordinary human-ness struggling in extraordinary times. Samuele’s father’s stories of journeys aboard his fishing vessel parallel the flights of the refugees, at once embedding the migrants’ plights within normal human experience while emphasizing their inordinate suffering. Tellingly, in refugee-centric scenes, there are overtly science fiction-like objects—foil blankets, hazmat suits and spinning satellite dishes—but Rosi again allows the viewer to imbue meaning on these. Only in the film’s closing moments, when the arguments are complete and the points have been made, does the camera directly show us the carnage—tangles of corpses—aboard the migrant boats. Such stark, absolute messages are absent from the rest of Fire at Sea.
The images, parallel editing and subtle storytelling accumulate into a resolute narrative conclusion to Fire at Sea. This is catalyzed by its painstaking ethnographic approach. Rosi’s documentary is firmly rooted to a specific place and to the concrete ways that the natives in that space have adapted to its environment, its economy and its culture. The Italians who live on Lampedusa are shown to have a great attachment to their homes and lifestyles. They eat spaghetti, chop Roma tomatoes, request classic Italian tunes and still use their hundred-year-old fishing vessels. Samuele’s family is settled and they are attached to their lives in this specific space. By contrast, the migrants pass through, without roots or customs or attachments. They are quickly processed before leaving the screen. What remains constant in the film is the Lampedusans. The message is clear: the refugees, too, were once firmly established in a home and attached to a space; they must have suffered some unspeakably terrible fate to give up that place. Their seeking out of a new sanctuary is an innately human action and one we should all support. It is an argument founded on compassionate empathy.
In sum, Rosi’s Fire at Sea is crucial, wrenching and achingly beautiful. Its rhetorical styling is subtle, yet stentorian in its own way.
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