Fire at Sea

They say that when you’re pur­chas­ing a house, you should wait until the weath­er is nei­ther rainy nor sun­ny. That way it won’t colour your assess­ment of the prop­er­ty before you hand over obscene amounts of mon­ey for it. In his 2013 Venice prize-win­ner, Sacro GRA, about the diver­si­ty of life con­nect­ed by a Roman ring road, and this new film, about the sor­ry lot of African refugees pass­ing through Ital­ian waters, the skies – like the direc­tor – remain defi­ant­ly neutral.

Fire at Sea takes place on the crag­gy, step­ping-stone island of Lampe­dusa which sits almost exact­ly half way between the Libyan cap­i­tal of Tripoli and Sici­ly. Fish­ing is the island’s main indus­try, though that noble tra­di­tion is slow­ly being usurped. Boats are now used to assist the dan­ger­ous­ly jam-packed rafts trans­port­ing those flee­ing oppres­sive African regimes in search of a bet­ter life in Europe.

This is a polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy doc, but under a more art­ful guise. The hor­ren­dous con­di­tions on these rick­ety rafts show that those will­ing to board have been left with no oth­er choice. Hear­ing about the places from which they’re escap­ing, the risk becomes more ratio­nal. They know the odds of sur­viv­ing the voy­age are slim, but it’s a gam­ble they absolute­ly must take. Rosi films a refugee cat­a­logu­ing the abus­es he’s endured in the form of a rous­ing prayer-chant, and it’s a scene which suc­cinct­ly cap­tures the hor­ri­fy­ing con­text of the so-called ​“migrant cri­sis” while crit­i­cis­ing the mis-direct­ed indig­na­tion of the west.

As with Sacro GRA, Rosi takes great pains to fuse sub­ject with land­scape. The elab­o­rate seabound res­cue mis­sions are viewed as inci­den­tal to the life of errant school­boy, Samuele, who’s pre­sent­ed as a care­free Den­nis the Men­ace-type search­ing for ways to kill time. The film’s open­ing shot observes as he inel­e­gant­ly scales a small tree to col­lect a branch that he can fash­ion into a cat­a­pult. With a pal, he then fires shards of slate into fat cac­tus leaves, tap­ing them back up before wend­ing his way home for tea.

You might think that watch­ing Samuele’s attempts to light­en his fair­ly mun­dane exis­tence (the Chap­lin-esque man­ner in which he eats spaghet­ti is a joy to behold) would bring some lev­i­ty to the mate­r­i­al, but the oppo­site is true. The film isn’t about Samuele, nor is it about the refugees, it’s about how these two words are sub­tly adjoined. Even though Lampe­dusa is a place where lit­tle actu­al­ly hap­pens, Samuele remains bliss­ful­ly unaware that death and hard­ship are but a stone’s throw away. With­out hec­tor­ing, plead­ing or instruct­ing, the film uses this small (though high­ly per­ti­nent) case study to exam­ine the bound­less breadth of human expe­ri­ence and the impos­si­bil­i­ty of cal­cu­lat­ing the inner-tor­ment of our fel­low man.

It cel­e­brates indi­vid­u­al­i­ty and shows how easy it is to take tran­quil sta­bil­i­ty for grant­ed. Fire at Sea feels like a dis­tant but crisp echo of Vit­to­rio De Sica’s 1948 neo­re­al­ist clas­sic, Bicy­cle Thieves. It asks whether we have become desen­si­tised to polit­i­cal atroc­i­ties. It also asks whether inno­cence is a pos­si­ble state of being in a soci­ety where extreme suf­fer­ing is always hov­er­ing in our col­lec­tive blind spot.