Director Gianfranco Rosi didn’t set out to make a political film. Holed up on the Italian island of Lampedusa for some eighteen months, his goal, really, was to create an intimate portrait of the place itself; a remote Sicilian outpost of sleepy fishermen and sling-shot obsessed kids. By the time he’d finished shooting in 2015, however, Europe was gripped by a refugee crisis of unprecedented scale and Lampedusa, in its decades long role as the first stop for migrants arriving in Europe from Africa and the Middle East, found itself at the very centre.
Fire at Sea, then, is very much a film of two halves. On the one hand, an often humorous story of life on a small island – a lazy-eyed boy, Samuele, practices his slingshot on a patch of weather-beaten cacti, his grandmother straightens the bed, a local DJ dedicates old war songs to various residents – and on the other, a moving document of the peril facing the thousands upon thousands of those who attempt the crossing when, in the words of British-Somali poet Warsan Shire, “the sea is safer than the land.”
The stories, bar that of the island’s sympathetic and overstretched doctor, rarely cross in a physical sense; the Lampedusians do not come face to face with those that make it. Yet in the unexplained anxiety suffered by Samuele, the weariness in the news reports of the local DJ and unbearable melancholy of the landscape, Rosi gently plants the idea that no one and nowhere – not even tiny, remote Lampedusa – is ever really an island. Not when an injury to one is so clearly an injury to all.
Today is World Refugee Day but, for the over 20 million currently displaced, so is tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. Against the backdrop of an EU referendum for which migration will be a defining factor, we spoke to Gianfranco Rosi about the situation facing the continent today and what our collective response to it should be.
I’ve seen the film twice now and what really jumps out the second time are all of the little signposts in there. Particularly with Samuele’s lazy eye and what an incredible chance metaphor that was for how Europe views the crisis.
But everything that somebody does is an involuntary metaphor, you know? When he builds the enemy [out of cacti], it’s like what we do, building the enemy and then fighting. The war, the lazy eye, the anxiety… He has this anxiety about something we don’t know.
Do you think it stems from the larger issue going on around him? Or is that reading too much into it?
Who knows, you know? But in the film, yes. When you structure a film in the editing, you create a narrative, and you use all the things you have in order to build a story. So what it became for me was an element of strong narration that was, in a way, holding this suspense towards the unknown, right? Beyond Lampedusa. Because that was the first part that I shot in the film, the island itself, without really filming the migration. We didn’t really have the permits to do all that in the beginning. So they arrived later in the film, which allowed me somehow first to create a strong identity of the island itself; the kid, through the doctor, through the marina, through the fisherman, through the DJ and the radio… But what, for me, was interesting when I was shooting the film, was to see how much Samuele made possible certain analogies about a world that, for us, is still the unknown. And somehow all his state of mind, of mood… It’s mostly about a state of mind. It’s strange to say it’s a film about migration. It’s a film about the, how do you say, novel of self growth?
Coming of age?
That’s what the film is about. And somehow politics took over completely. If this film would have come out two years ago, exactly the same film would not have this impact that it’s having now.
When did you become aware that what you were making was becoming increasingly timely?
When it was finished basically. Because Lampedusa has been having this moment for twenty years and no one was talking about it, except when there was some big tragedy, or people dying there. That’s why I started to make the film, to give more, to show what was Lampedusa, this island that nobody knew about. And then slowly, slowly with the Balkans Crisis, with all the new things, Europe realised, “Oh, there are people moving here”. But this has been going on for years and years and years. Twenty years at least. 450,000 people pass through Lampedusa and these are people that don’t stay in Italy. They arrive all over Europe. But nobody was talking before last summer.
And by that point the film was already shot?
I’d almost finished by that point, yeah. But if the film would have come out six months earlier, it would be a completely different perception, you know? It would be like, “Okay, it’s a film where there are some migrants, that’s strange…” But now the reading that there is into the film is much bigger than the film itself. And the film leaves so much space for interpretation, which is interesting. The way people make their own assumptions out of that, you know? Each one experiences whatever they want out of the film and builds their own issues.
What’s interesting too is that the film has become politicised, but you didn’t set out to make a political film.
It’s not. There are three moments that are political: the title; the story of the Nigerian people, maybe, when they sink, that’s a strong political moment.
The doctor too, perhaps?
But the doctor is not political. He’s just a human being that forms his own feelings, you know? There are very little moments in the film which are political… Death of course, that’s political. When you film death, that’s a very strong element. But the film is built with such small elements and the doors keep closing, there’s no formation in the film. So everybody brings into the film, I believe, what their own knowledge is and makes their own interaction.
Aside from the text at the beginning you offer very little context.
And the film doesn’t give any answers. It maybe opens questions and maybe brings some awareness and what I want the film to bring is that it’s unacceptable that people die, escaping from tragedy. This is, for me, what is unacceptable. And when you have the huge numbers, 20,000 people die in the Mediterranean trying to escape from tragedies, you know? And this is what is unacceptable, I think, in this moment of history.
And having been faced with it so directly, you must have become even more determined in how we address the situation.
Yeah, well, that’s when I decided to put death in the film. And to show that moment was a political choice.
You kind of had to show it though, didn’t you? You couldn’t have left it out.
I had to show that. And it was a big, big, big challenge. Because, at that point, I had so many images of death, of things, of people close to death that I’d filmed over these one and a half years. But that somehow became very strong and symbolic for me, the fact that people died, gassed by the fuel of the engine in this boat, you know, because they were packed down there. And that’s how they died. It’s like a gas chamber. And that tragedy somehow came to me, you know? We arrived there and suddenly these bodies came onto this boat of people dying. And we went back to the navy boat and slowly, slowly people were talking, “There are other people under, did you take them out?” and nobody knew. Slowly, slowly we discovered that there were 50 people dead, under the boat.
And that was when you stopped filming.
That was when I finished the film. For me, after I shot that, something was deeply changed inside of my mind and my willing to keep working in this field. That’s when I decided that we start editing and that’s when I decided that this scene had to be there and somehow the film was built in order to arrive to show that scene, and in order to leave from that scene. And after, I don’t know if you noticed, but after that scene, there is twenty five minutes of silence, with no words. It’s like a mourning to the end. A transformation. So all this, somehow, is a structure in order to arrive at this, without this appearing morbid or pornographic.
Those signposts along the way… How important was it that there were moments of quiet humour in there too? Because there are some very funny parts.
I think humour is a very important part of narration. It gives some distance from tragedy. The song itself, Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare), is a very tragic song. It talks about the war, it talks about the boat being on fire, but the song is so light. I like to use this contrast.
And the use of that song and the title… You’re suggesting that this is the biggest crisis Europe has faced since the war.
And unfortunately nothing is happening. Nobody is doing anything besides putting naval ships on the sea. And the number of deaths keep increasing, so maybe we are at the point where we need to shift our attention to the borders and start acting there, where the problem is. And maybe taking out people from Libya where they are victims of human trafficking. It’s too late when they arrive in Lampedusa or in Sicily or on the Balkan or in Greece. You know at that point, it really becomes number. And that number is so enormous, we don’t know how to deal with it anymore. But if there action to create this humanitarian bridge from Libya to Europe and Europe is ready to accept these people, dividing in all different countries… What’s 250,000 in a 500,000,000 people continent, you know?
What are your thoughts on the UK’s upcoming EU referendum?
That’s scary because the UK is cutting itself out of history. And the UK is one of the major protagonists in the last 200/300 years of Europe’s formation. And to cut itself out from the identity created by the UK, not only in Europe, but in the world… The UK is responsible for the borders that were created in the Middle East and these are the consequences of that policy, that post-colonial policy. So now to suddenly just cut the umbilical cord with Europe… I think it’s going to be the beginning of a tragedy for Europe.
I must ask you how you managed to build such a trust with the people on the island. It’s as though the camera isn’t there.
Well, it’s like life. First of all, I never take out my camera immediately, you know? It takes months for me to take out the camera. First I have to explore the place itself – the island with its own implications – and then, whatever is there in this place, I have to be able to transfer it in within the characters that I choose. And usually it’s like five or six people that I’m able to link and carry on their own story. And once I choose this and encounter these people and I feel that this is part of the story, I don’t know where this is going to take me, but I decide to start a journey with them. As I say, I work alone so it creates a very strong intimacy with the camera. But before I take out the camera I spend a lot of time with them. With the doctor we became very, very good friends because these are people that I somehow have a very strong connection with. otherwise I would not be able to film. It’s like two people making steps towards each other and once there’s that link and that trust, it’s my duty to get into the character study. My duty is to grab it from the inside of the people, who they are exactly, and bring it out into the field.
Fire at Sea is out now.
Credits
Text Matthew Whitehouse