Sometimes real life provides us with symbolic imagery that is every bit as potent and sophisticated as anything you would find in a fictional narrative. And one of the great strengths of Gianfranco Rosi’s Berlin film festival prize-winning documentary is that the director is able to look at a dauntingly huge topic of global import – the migrant crisis – and find within it the little moments of poetic resonance that illuminate the human lives behind the stark statistics.
The film takes place on, and around, the island of Lampedusa, 20 sq km of arid scrubland and arcane traditions. Since the early 00s, this isolated fishing community, located 127 miles from the southern coast of Sicily, has become one of the main entry points to Europe for refugees risking the treacherous sea crossing from north Africa. By focusing on Lampedusa, Rosi juxtaposes insular old Europe with a very 21st-century global reality.
Migration is a topic that could hardly be more charged , but Rosi is no brow-beating polemicist. His approach is unobtrusive and observational rather than confrontational. The two worlds, that of the newly arrived refugees, adrift and traumatised, and the timeless locals, shaped by generations of devotion to the sea and the church, have surprisingly little interaction. However, Rosi seeks out threads between the two communities. The harrowing radio distress calls from sinking migrant vessels find an echo in the local radio station, where a young man plays songs from a bygone era and takes dedications from his most loyal listener, his aunt. A savagely beaten refugee gestures mutely to his facial injuries. On the rescue boat, he weeps tears mixed with blood. And in the most elegant of Rosi’s parallels, a boy on Lampedusa called Samuele is diagnosed with a lazy eye. Like most of Europe, he sees, but doesn’t see.
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This article was amended on 16 June 2016 to remove an incorrect reference to Lampedusa being the location for Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash. It was filmed on Pantelleria, about 100 mile to the north.
