‘Fire at Sea’: an astonishing, poetic doc about migration crisis
‘Fire at Sea’: an astonishing, poetic doc about migration crisis
“Fire at Sea,” a mesmerizing documentary about the migration crisis in Europe, opens with a familiar device: cue cards that announce a serious problem, in this case the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have been flooding Lampedusa, a microscopic Mediterranean island between Sicily and Africa.
Yet after the gravity of the situation is spelled out and the cue cards fade, this remarkable film takes us to some surprising vantage points.
[...] throughout director Gianfranco Rosi’s very human film that was shortlisted this week for an Academy Award for best documentary, we feel the bewilderment of the parochial yet decent residents, the helplessness of the well-intentioned yet overwhelmed rescuers, and the anguish and disorientation of the refugees.
Rosi steers clear of narration and moral judgments, though Pietro Bartolo, a community doctor on the island, provides some haunting observations about what the refugees have suffered in their quest for freedom.
The refugees themselves don’t have the screen time one might expect in a documentary about migration, but they make an indelible impression.