Fire at Sea

The documentary sets two lives side by side on Lampedusa. On one side is Samuele, twelve years old, playing with a slingshot, learning to handle a boat, diagnosed with a lazy eye, his father a fisherman. On the other are the people pulled from the boats trying to reach the island, the quarantine area and the dead. The two lines barely intersect, and Gianfranco Rosi does that on purpose: for the islanders this is daily life, for the arrivals it is a border. Its hardest passage is the account given by the island's only doctor. There is no narrator, no interview and no music. It won the Golden Bear in Berlin and was nominated for an Oscar. Rosi lived on the island for over a year to make it. Who it is for: viewers who like observational documentary and want to understand migration. Who it is not for: anyone avoiding images of the dead.