Fuocoammare (2016) Reviews

• Notes form a small island

  rubenm2016-10-03

  Fifteen thousand people have died on their way from North Africa to the Italian island Lampedusa. That's five times as much as the number of casualties in the 9/11 attacks. The scale of this human tragedy is almost impossible to fathom. And yet, that's exactly what director Gianfranco Rosi has tried to do in this documentary. He must have spent many months with the Italian coast guard, which tracks down the vessels with refugees. And he must have shot an immense quantity of footage, because it's clear he has selected only the best material. The film doesn't explain or elaborate. It just shows, as a good movie is supposed to do. There is some very shocking footage, but also plenty of small, almost ordinary scenes like a beautiful shot of a helicopter taking off, or a doctor doing a check-up of a newly arrived refugee pregnant with twins. But there are not only scenes of refugees. There is also daily life on the island, which we see through the eyes of a small boy. The contrast between the calm, uneventful lives of the boy and his family, and the utter despair and misery of the refugees, is what makes this film special. It also offers the viewer some relief from the grim scenes at sea. Some of the scenes featuring the boy are really funny, such as his visit to the doctor because of an imagined illness. The editing of the film is great. There is a slow build-up, with scenes whose meaning is not immediately clear. But later on, things fall into place. The most shocking footage is shown near the end. Also, there is a very good balance between the rescue scenes at sea and almost poetic scenes of daily life on the island.

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• I must now have compassion fatigue

  emuir-12017-07-09

  I realize that the film was meant to show how the lives of the islanders were impacted by the refugee crisis, but it didn't. The film showed endless footage of a young boy playing, making catapults, pretending to shoot down aircraft? birds? shooting at cactus, getting his eyes tested, and a friend riding his scooter. There was footage of his family life, mama cooking, peeling vegetables, the family eating, mama making a bed. A DJ playing requests, and on, but no scenes of the interaction with the refugees/migrants. We saw the coast guard rescuing dying migrants from overcrowded boats, the immigration people processing them and the doctor examining and talking about them. There was an African migrant screaming like a gospel preacher about the hardships they had endured and those who have died en route, but for all we saw, the residents seemed to live a life apart and are totally unaffected if not unaware of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have ended up on their small island. The film did show the comfortable orderly lives of the islanders and their comfortable homes, contrasting with the destitution of the migrants who have lost everything - their homes, jobs, family members and face an uncertain future after a hazardous and sometimes deadly journey, but other than the doctor, no one seemed particularly bothered. Questions which were not answered, where are the migrants getting all the money for the journey, which seems to cost around $10,000 and more. Just the boat trip from Libya to Lampedusa costs between $1,500 and $850 depending on your place in the boat, and seeing as most of the migrants are from Central Africa, getting to Libya must cost ten times more. What are the smugglers doing with all their money which must run into hundreds of millions by now. Where is it being laundered. What is being done to catch the smugglers? Are the migrants really in peril and facing death, or are they being enticed by the people smugglers with false claims of a land of milk and honey. If the latter, why are they not writing (or phoning on the ubiquitous cell phones) to warn their friends and family not to come? Perhaps it is compassion fatigue, but as we saw the dead migrants being unloaded from the tiny overcrowded boat, I was reminded of the cry of 'Bring out your dead' in the days of the plague.

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• boring, unfocused, just plain bad

  mamlukman2016-09-09

  I saw this today at the Toronto Film Festival. The director spent a year and a half on this? Are you kidding? If the following makes for fascinating filmmaking in your opinion, this is the movie for you: -a woman making a bed -a boy looking at a bird in a tree -2 boys carving faces in cactuses -5-6 brief shots of a radio DJ playing songs -a woman getting a sonogram -a boy getting an eye exam -and much more of the same!!!! It took real inspiration to take a topic with built-in drama and turn it into a mish-mash of pretentious "artistic" nothing. Virtually nothing on the refugees, and no interviews with them at all. The only moving part was the shot of the dead refugees in the hold of the boat. Other than that, it is empty of both content and emotion. This is, sadly, one of the worst movies I have ever seen and a colossal waste of two hours.

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• Heart-wrenching docudrama: dying to be free

  davidgee2016-07-09

  FIRE AT SEA won the 'Golden Bear' best picture award at the Berlin Film Festival in February. Part documentary, part docudrama, it was filmed on the Italian island of Lampedusa, which lies roughly midway between Libya and Sicily and has become the first port of call for more than 100,000 migrants from Africa and the Middle East. Over 15,000 have drowned, dying to be set free from terror and tyranny and poverty. We see the Italian navy rescuing migrants from their sinking overcrowded boats and dinghies; many of them are in a desperate condition after days at sea. We get glimpses of the 'internment camp'where they wait to be processed and sent on to their uncertain future in a Europe which is increasingly unwelcoming. Alternating with the refugee crisis, the film's main focus is Samuele, a 12-year-old Lampedusan who lives with his fisherman father and grandmother. The family play themselves in the style of a Pasolini movie (minus the sex and the blasphemy). We watch Samuele slurping spaghetti, struggling with homework, playing with a slingshot. They seem to have a very limited awareness of the migrant situation, although that is perhaps only the director's way of pointing up the contrast between the ordinariness of their lives and the appalling tragedy taking place in the waters around their island. This heart-wrenching film offers no solution to the crisis. How could it? There clearly isn't one.

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• knock knock who's there…? someone missing…?

  adrin-650782016-07-13

  Lampedusa as filmed by Gianfranco Rosi is a visual paean to oppositions: the empty /the full, the ordered/ the chaotic, the open/ the closed, internal / the external, within time/without time And more. Oppositions organised in geographic proximity. Islanders and refugees both sharing space on this small Mediterranean island. But now you see them now you don't. On the island we see the islanders but we don't see the migrants, they are invisible, their new European identities as the 'unseen' already anticipated. On Lampedusa the streets are empty, the escapees confined to their own enclaves. The islanders lead out their traditional lives on Lampedusa, life ordered by a natural unfolding of time that divides into past present future. The refugees and migrants live outside the order of time, compressed into a chaotic hallucinogenic now. The islanders are rooted on rock and lapped by the sea. The migrants travelling across water, crashing onto the rocks or scooped out of the Mediterranean are alive if they are lucky, dead if they are not. They are trapped in endless motions in which time has ceased to be a significant marker of life. For the migrants the imperative is 'escape' to not stop fleeing until they find something. When in due course, they leave Lampedusa they leave no imprint on the island other than on the statistical compilations of NGOs. More than 400,000 thousand passed through, ghosts rather than solid entities. Without commentary and working though image simple, many of Rosi's shots comprise two great encompassers of Lampedusa: sea and sky. Images that Rossi exploits, but which conjure different associations for the islanders and migrants. The sea before and sky overhead stretch out around and over, containing the sentience of all beings. For the islanders the surrounding waters are their environment, a living testament to their collective history, the source of their food and livelihood. For the arrivees, the migrants the sea is experienced otherwise: as barrier ordeal and death. The sky that hangs over Lampadusa hangs over all beings. For the islanders this sky with rolling clouds signifies the here and now, the intensity of the present, it mediates action, reflects back consciousness of life. For the arrivees it barely exists as a psychic immediacy. On Lampedusa the migrants are as if in a state of trance they are trapped in their own internal landscapes. An island boy whittles wood to make his catapult; a Nigerian recounts as a liturgy in collective form the ordeal of his flight: "We crossed the dessert the dessert could not stop us, we crossed the mountains the mountains could not stop us, we ran to the sea, the sea could not stop us." The effect of his words echoes the power of the old testament, the cry of a people lost in the wilderness, a people possessed by the spirit. Although the images are not juxtaposed in Rosi's edit, I somehow connected this liturgical listing of ordeals survived and overcome with the long duration shot of the grandmother making up her bed. The order the certainty represented in this act of meticulous physical geometry; the ecclesiastic lay out of her bedroom with its saints and sacred objects. A feeling of deadness in this bedroom, reflected and compounded in the images of dead migrants suffocated in the steerage hold of their boat, lying in filth and squalor, perhaps many of them without names. The dead are everywhere. I understand that Rosi wanted to make a pure film. In which images manipulated and exploited would stand for any words that might or could be said. But the human voice is part of our world. Rosi's Fire at Sea felt like a piece of filmic surgery, a clinicians assemblage of images. As Rosi knocked on the door of Lampedusa it seemed as if he was not there. He had absented himself. And perhaps this is OK. No voice. Rosi in avoiding the stories of refugees and migrants the staple of radio and TV, Rosi, abstracting his material reaches out into the reality of the the void of refugees and migrants. They are people stripped out of time, stripped out of history, a group of people living in a timevoid. A void which groups like Isis seek, in their own time to fill, by giving back to those lost in time the precious gift of time. This is a film about the medium of time. adrin neatrour

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