Fire at Sea movie review & film summary (2016)
Lampedusa is, per Wikipedia, the largest island of the Pelagie Islands in the Mediterranean Sea. Its closeness to Libya makes it a relatively desirable landing point for African and North African refugees fleeing from wars, unrest, and starvation on that continent. “Relatively” desirable because, as the movie shows in patiently unfolded detail, there’s really very little upside to being a refugee.
Directed by Gianfranco Rosi, the movie begins with a text that reels off some numbers: 400,000 migrants, 15,000 deaths. Such big numbers are hard to see as anything but abstractions. Rosi then cuts to some beautiful, peaceful imagery. Giant radio antennas revolve in front of a dramatic sky full of grey clouds over an undulating sea. A radio DJ says some calming words. It doesn’t seem like a deadly environment.
The movie doesn’t use any narration; the opening text is all the hand-holding the viewer gets. Rosi instead homes his camera on narratives pertaining at first to the natives of the island. A compassionate doctor is seen treating patients who clearly aren’t locals. He bemoans the indignities they suffer, and their deaths. A young boy, a neighbor of the doctor, makes slingshots using medical rubber bands and takes them to a local field to shoot with his pals. Soon there are shots of choppers and a boat. The latest batch of migrants is here.
“They’re drenched in diesel,” one coastal patrol worker says, examining a few people who have come off a boat. “If I flicked a cigarette lighter in here the whole room would go up.” The underfed migrants, who mostly look down at their feet as they meet the people into whose hands they’ve placed their fates, grow voluble after a while. In a holding cell, one of them speak-sings of his journey here, from Nigeria. “We drank our piss to survive,” he wails, both proud and miserable. The doctor continues treating these folks, one by one. The young boy, Samuele, is diagnosed with lazy eye and wanders around with an eyepatch. The sea is always there, ready to deliver new shipments of humanity.
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