Fire at Sea

Featured in the Migration Series, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 13–16, 2017

www.mfa.org/programs/series/hollywood-scriptures-migrations

Golden Bear winner at the Berlin Film Festival

Lampedusa's Two Worlds

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What’s most remarkable about Gianfranco Rosi’s film Fire at Sea, about African and Middle Eastern migrants precariously crossing the Mediterranean to Italy’s southernmost island of Lampedusa, is its low-key, quiet delivery. How can the film be so unflappably measured when such human drama and tragedy take place before our eyes? Since the early 2000s, some 400,000 migrants have tried to reach Europe via one of its closest portals—Lampedusa—only seventy miles from Tunisia.

Fire at Sea opens with two contrasting worlds that form the documentary’s structure: simple, fisherman life on a tiny, windblown island juxtaposed against the horrific ordeal of migrants risking their lives for a safer or better future. Never the twain do meet, and Rosi has called the island “a metaphor for Europe, for these two worlds that do not encounter each other.”

First we meet twelve-year-old Samuele, playing alone on the deserted, scrubby landscape, the sound of the sea in the distance. He finds the perfect branch for a sling-shot and begins whittling it into shape. The scene shifts to nighttime and a communications satellite at Lampedusa’s refugee center. “Your position please,” a professional voice keeps repeating, while a voice on the other end of the radio transmission pleads in desperation: “Help us! We’re sinking!” We then view a long shot of the refugee center on the island’s southern shoreline from a Coast Guard ship searching the water for the emergency.

We switch back to the islanders and their undisturbed lives and traditions. A young radio disc jockey plays popular songs for his listeners, including “Fire at Sea,” a World War II song about the bombing of an Italian warship in the harbor. Uneventful island life interchanges with the catastrophic situation at sea, with more time given to the islanders at first, with the migrant story unfolding by increment until we’re prepared for a long and graphic rescue segment, where dead bodies are pulled from the lower level of a boat, and the anguish of the survivors can’t be ignored. These are real faces, real moments in real people’s lives—families have lost loved ones, families have suffered unimaginable terror in their past and their present. It is just before this horrific scene that the sea’s horizon is a fiery orange, held by the camera for a long moment, perhaps symbolically.

While Samuele and his school friend shoot their sling-shots at cactuses or ride a scooter back and forth in the village, or hang out watching an old fisherman spool his lines, we also view an aging housewife in an immaculate kitchen prepare dinner. It may be that life for Lampedusa’s fishermen is fraught with danger at sea, but the world we witness on screen is safe, orderly, peaceful, and provided for.

It sharply contrasts to what other Italians are doing on the island on a daily basis—processing stunned refugees wearing foil blankets for warmth. On the rescue boats, the personnel wear white hazmat suits and direct the survivors to various parts of the boat, separating the sick and dying from the better off. Many refugees have been badly burned from leaking diesel fuel in the holds. We cannot help but think that the officials’ hands reaching out to those boarding the ship convey a humanitarian touch. They are akin to saviors. But what awaits the refugees in the no man’s land of the greater reception center is far from Samuele’s comfortable, hum-drum life. It’s a state of limbo and fear, and it’s heartbreaking to witness how human beings by nature still rally themselves in dire circumstances: One night the men in the center organize a soccer game and argue vociferously over which nationalities will play—Somalia, Sudan, Libya. But the game that ensues totally absorbs them, and they cheer and hug for joy when a team member scores a goal. In other scenes, the survivors call their relatives from phone booths, or they pray or sing together. One man uses his voice and rhythm to rap about his terrifying experiences—the raping and killing of many people, the lack of food, the thirty who were rescued but the rest who died.

Life goes on, on Lampedusa: Samuele checking out boats in the harbor and learning to row in preparation for his future at sea; the housewife making afternoon espresso for her silent seaman, their world following a regular, neat-as-a-pin routine, no blips on the radar screen. In another scene, the woman makes their bed, smoothing it to perfection, and then kisses the photo of her husband and afterward the room’s religious icons. Her world is spotless.

In this minimalist movie of silence and only natural sounds as they occur, Dr. Bartolo anchors the story by describing his long-term medical role with the refugees. He softly, wistfully relates how he has examined hundreds of corpses, many of them children, and treated the ill. In one long scene, he performs a sonogram on a pregnant woman survivor, and gently tells her what he’s seeing—a girl, a heart, twins. He tells us how the amniotic fluid is scarce in the pregnant women who make it to shore. He describes the boats, their various levels, and how those at the bottom level emerge in the worst shape, often with chemical burns, or dead from suffocation. Examining so many dead people “leaves you with emptiness,” he says in his melancholic way. “It makes you think.” Dr. Bartolo also treats the island’s residents, including Samuele, who has a lazy eye and suffers tension and worry, though in the film we don’t see this anxious side of him.

Juxtaposing the flaming horizon image that preceded the long rescue scene, a cool moon appearing through night clouds sets the stage for the movie’s finale—the continuity of life on Lampedusa: Samuele in the dark with a flashlight, making a bird call in a tree until a bird responds and boy and bird are face to face; the matronly housewife kissing her husband’s photo and saying, “Let me have a nice day”; the DJ playing lacrymose music; and later in the day, Samuele on the docks amusing himself with an imaginary machine gun that goes, “chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck.”

If there’s a refugee center on the island, with hundreds of people living and waiting for a place to call home, it is unknown to the island people and their way of life.