Fire at Sea

Winner of the Golden Lion at Venice with Sacro GRA (2013), director Gianfranco Rosi also took the Golden Bear at Berlin with this engrossing study of the impact of the migrant crisis on the Italian island of Lampedusa. During a year-long stay, Rosi witnessed several search-and-rescue operations for the boatloads of refugees fleeing African poverty and Middle Eastern conflict. But, while this discreetly unflinching footage proves harrowing in the extreme, it acquires additional potency from its juxtaposition with the impish antics of chatty 12-year-old Samuele, a fisherman's son who gets seasick in a gentle swell when not firing his home-made catapult in the scrubland hills with best friend Mattias. Rosi also drops in on a radio DJ (who has a penchant for sentimental Sicilian ballads) and talks to the local doctor, who tends to both the new arrivals and those who fail to survive the perilous Mediterranean crossing in often-hellish conditions. The two worlds barely seem to collide, even though Lampedusa is barely eight square miles in size and some 400,000 souls have passed through it over the last 20 years. But Rosi makes it abundantly clear this is an emergency that affects everyone.