Europe’s response to the migrant question is the subject of this complex, mysterious, sophisticated and superbly photographed documentary portrait by the Italian film-maker Gianfranco Rosi.
It shows scenes from the day-to-day life of Lampedusa, the Sicilian island which is on the front line of this crisis. Desperate souls from Africa and the Middle East arrive there in horrifyingly unsafe inflatables every week; thousands die around its coast.
Rosi focuses on one mischievous boy, Samuele, who is being treated for a lazy eye by a doctor who must also tend to the migrants and carry out autopsies on their corpses. The doctor, who is the point of contact between the indigenous islanders and the traumatised incomers, is himself becoming ill and depressed by this terrible burden.
Geography has made Lampedusa the point of landfall for the agonised refugees, just as history made it part of a European Union that is as prosperous and attractive as the US once was for European migrants. Rosi records what this means to people on the ground, how the fabric of life is being placed under violent stress.
For Lampedusa, the crisis is not a crisis – nothing so temporary, so dramatic. It has been happening for 20 years; it is the new normal. There is an enigmatic pageant of scenes: people preparing placidly for supper; migrants playing football, impassive figures in hazmat suits silently bringing migrants’ bodies ashore.
What we are seeing is a kind of life during wartime that everyone is almost inured to – but a terrible sadness and anger rises in waves from this film.
