Fire at Sea

Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare, 2016) — watch online on iFILM. Director Gianfranco Rosi spent a year on Lampedusa, the tiny Sicilian island that sits roughly halfway between Italy and North Africa, and has become one of the main entry points into Europe for people fleeing conflict and poverty. He shot two parallel lives: twelve-year-old Samuele, who wanders the island with a slingshot and gets seasick on flat water, and Dr Pietro Bartolo, the local physician who boards the arriving boats.

These two worlds almost never meet. That distance — ordinary island life continuing metres from an ongoing humanitarian crisis — is what Rosi puts on screen without commentary or explanation. He observes. The camera stays still and lets the weight accumulate on its own.

The film took the Golden Bear at Berlin and made the Oscar shortlist for best documentary. It is not an easy watch, but it is a precise one. Rosi's approach — no narrator, no music score to cue emotion — demands attention and repays it. Stream Fire at Sea (2016) on iFILM.