Fire At Sea

While at times you will wonder how director Gianfranco Rosi will marry the two narratives here, Fire At Sea's disparate stories hold together better than his previous outing, Sacro GRA.

The small Sicilian island of Lampedusa is visited regularly by overcrowded boats of African refugees, escaping poverty, war, ISIS and more horrors. Here twelve-year-old Samuele doesn't have the aptitude for fishing his father has, throwing up on board and unable to steer a rowing boat with any degree of skill. He's much more comfortable with his slingshot, a skill the boy takes pride in not only his hit rate but also in his construction; like a sage he advises a friend what branch from which tree makes the best sling (pine preferably). This talent is diminished considerably when he's forced to wear a patch to correct his lazy eye, however.

Where Samuele's story is very personal, the story of the asylum seekers is told as a group. The refugees are prone to chemical burns from the fuel of the poorly constructed boats. The 'class system' with those able to pay $1500 granted a place topside and those with only $800 in the hold, which is like a furnace. Pietro Bartelo, the doctor in the village, is haunted by the dead women and children he encounters on a regular basis; one woman was pulled from one boat dead, her stillborn child still attached to her by umbilical cord. Bartelo must then go about an autopsy: "Another affront." He says he dreams of this often and stresses that one doesn't become desensitised to it all.

But these are just stories and one would be forgiven in thinking that we're going to be spared scenes of horror. Not so. Although opening with the distressing pleas for help by lost refugees in a sinking boat, Rosi holds back on the horror until the final twenty minutes… and then the dam bursts. Survivors, dying of dehydration, are pulled from the dinghies onto rescue boats and laid on the deck, shaking. The rows of body bags. One woman, visibly exhausted to the point of tears, asks if 'all the black men made it aboard' and, having got her answer, promptly falls asleep.

Where their story and Samuele’s thematically meet is, in typical Rossi fashion, two or three steps removed. At one point he goes to Bartelo claiming he can't catch a breath, that he suffers from anxiety. Perhaps, even in his safe little world, he’s feeling an echo of the fear these pour souls experience every day.