Cast:
Samuele Pucillo, Pietro Bartolo, Samuele Caruana
Intro:
An unconventional doco that is sometimes nightmarishly effective but also in need of an edit.
In the last twenty years, 400,000 migrants have landed on Lampedusa – an island of twenty square miles. In trying to cross from the Strait of Sicily to Europe, an estimated 15,000 of these people have died.
We learn this at the very beginning of Fire At Sea. The rest of the film doesn’t add a great deal more information in terms of hard facts. That would be fine if it moved away from statistics to concentrate largely on the plight of the latest refugees, or their individual experiences – and when it does do that it’s horrifyingly and nightmarishly effective. A man tells (while others chant) a tragic tale of escape from Nigeria, prison in Libya and dehydration at sea… We see moribund people being hauled off unbelievably crowded boats by men in protective suits and masks…
But the bulk of the focus is on a handful of native Lampedusans, including a fisherman, a doctor, a radio DJ and (seemingly interminably) a 12-year-old boy with a catapult. Perhaps the idea was to underline how little most of these people’s lives are affected by the migrants, or how relatively insignificant their own problems are, but nonetheless some major editing and pruning might have been in order.
This is a rather unconventional documentary. Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily make it good. A lot of it merely serves to illustrate the fact that mundane things don’t cease to seem mundane – or even tedious – when they’re juxtaposed with major and tragic ones. If anything, they just look all the more trivial.
