http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/10/189022/shining-light-lampedusa-fire-sea-chronicles-refugee-crisis
Shining a Light on Lampedusa: Fire at Sea Chronicles Refugee Crisis
Posted: October 25, 2016
Ed Rampell
Fire At Sea, Kino Lorber, Inc.
In his award-winning documentary Fire at Sea, Eritrean-born director
Gianfranco Rosi shines a light on the most devastating refugee crisis
since World War II. He focuses on Lampedusa, an Italian island just
seventy miles west of Tunisia. In the past twenty years 400,000
migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan and North Africa, have crossed the
Mediterranean Sea to the eight-mile-long island of 6,000
residents—many of them fishermen—using it as an entry point to the
European Union.
Rosi moved to Lampedusa, spending months there to explore what press
notes calls “the greatest humanitarian tragedy of our times.” The
deplorable conditions the black and Arab immigrants experience while
at sea are heartbreakingly depicted. Like modern-day Roman
gladiators—clad in white hazmat suits instead of armor—sailors aboard
the Italian naval vessel Cigala Fulgosi make radio contact with
desperate, English-speaking boat people, pleading to be rescued.
Crewmen in helicopters and motorized crafts pinpoint their position
and often arrive to find overcrowded wooden boats, where many of those
in third class—in the hold—die due to dehydration, hunger, heat, and
other deprivations endured during a passage for which they’ve paid
between $1,500 and $800. According to the film, one cramped, rickety
boat carries 840 passengers: Human trafficking is big business.
In one haunting shot inside the hold of a ship, what are apparently
corpses are strewn about. It calls to mind the disturbing scene in
Costa-Gavras’ Missing, the 1982 classic about the Chilean coup against
socialist President Allende, when the Americans played by Jack Lemmon
and Sissy Spacek stumble across the cadavers of political prisoners
executed by General Pinochet’s henchmen.
Upon being rescued out at sea, the human cargo is transported by
Italian servicemen to a detention center at Lampedusa, where
conditions appear to be basic, but not drastically inhumane. There,
the newcomers from places such as Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Ivory Coast,
and Eritrea are given water and some sort of plastic garment to wear.
They compete in soccer matches, use payphones to call home, and hold
religious services for Muslims and Christians. The camp is merely a
way station, a clearinghouse of sorts.
Rosi, who was able to gain rare access to the Italian navy ship as
well as the encampment, described the latter as “a world within a
world, sealed off from the daily life of the island.” There, for the
documentarian, “the greatest challenge was finding a way to film this
universe that could convey a sense not only of truth and reality but
also of the humanity within.”
In addition to the nautical hell Rosi’s probing camera exposes, the
filmmaker reveals that “humanity” very compellingly in a scene where
the refugees describe the risks they have undertaken and why. During
what may be a church service of Nigerians, one English-speaking man
(most of Fire is subtitled) articulately recounts, in harrowing
detail, how he and fellow expatriates fled bombing in Nigeria.
Escaping to the Sahara, many of them die as they encounter “killing,”
“raping,” “hunger,” and the drinking of one’s own urine.
During the nearly two-hour film, Rosi crosscuts between the desperate
newcomers to Lampedusa and its longtime Italian inhabitants, who lead
simple lives. We see lovely underwater, nighttime sequences of a man
in a wetsuit hunting denizens of the deep such as squid. Islanders go
fishing in small boats as they pursue a traditional lifestyle. Fire
focuses on a little boy, Samuele Puccilo, who enjoys hunting birds in
the bush and along Lampedusa’s cliffs with his homemade slingshot and
goes to school, where, among other things, he studies English.
Remarkably, the isle’s Italians and migrants appear to lead completely
separate, if unequal, lives. But one thing unites them: When they get
sick they must turn to Lampedusa’s sole physician, Dr. Pietro Bartolo,
who treats Europeans and Africans alike. Bartolo describes himself as
a “witness” who must examine every cadaver and describing the horrors
he’s seen for three decades, confesses that he “never gets used to
it.” Bartolo shares some of these atrocities with Rosi by providing
him with computer images and files, but complains of the “emptiness”
and “nightmares” they cause him to experience.
“It’s up to every human being to help these people,” proclaims
Bartolo, whose compassion and humanity propels him to center stage in
Fire. With one foot in both worlds, the doctor symbolizes the
conscience of a beleaguered Europe, not unlike Liam Neeson as Oskar
Schindler, the German who rescued hundreds of Jews from the Holocaust
in Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 masterpiece about man’s
inhumanity to man.
Rosi attended university in Italy and studied cinema at New York
University. His 2013 documentary, Sacro Gra, about Rome’s ring road
highway, won the first Golden Lion award at the 70th Venice Film
Festival ever awarded to a documentary film. Fire at Sea won the
Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and is Italy’s
official submission to the 89th Academy Awards for Best Foreign
Language Film. Fire at Sea is a powerful, poignant chronicle about the
mass migration catastrophe. It was theatrically released in New York
on October 21 and opens October 28 in Los Angeles.
L.A.-based film historian/critic Ed Rampell is the author of
Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States
and co-author of The Hawaii Movie and Television Book.
Received on Tue Oct 25 2016 - 11:16:42 EDT