In Fire at Sea, two opposite worlds coexist in the most bizarre manner on an Italian island, where locals enjoy their best leisurely existence, while refugees literally risk their lives crossing the sea for a better future. As a documentary centered around the mounting refugee crisis on the European continent, Fire at Sea is simply beautiful, subtle, and most of all, heartbreaking.

Fire at Sea is unique in its perfect blending of two narratives, one focused on a local Italian family, the other the shiploads of refugees, mainly from Africa, as their separate lives inch towards each other, but never really coincide. The absence of any voiceover or score is unusual for a documentary feature, but it never gets in…

53/100

A.V. Club review. While I like most of this film's constituent parts, I'm considerably less keen on how they've been assembled. Basically, the concept of juxtaposing Lampedusa's refugee crisis with the banality of residents' daily lives, focusing on the particular obliviousness of one little boy, strikes me as didacticism in the guise of anti-didacticism, if that makes sense. Would happily have watched either of the two essentially separate documentaries Rosi has tendentiously combined here (couldn't tell you the purpose of some outlying stuff like the DJ), but every time he cut away from dying refugees to show the kid practicing his slingshot or whatever, I wanted to yell OKAY I GET IT ELSEWHERE NEARBY LIFE GOES ON UNPERTURBED. Yeah,…

I sometimes make a distinction with friends between Slow Cinema for the Youth and Slow Cinema for Adults. The former uses the long take for two reasons. First, it aims to instill painful bodily discomfort in the viewer akin to riding some sort of endurance roller coaster; the (presumably male) viewer feels a sense of masculine accomplishment for enduring this strain. At the same time, it seems to me to be a calculated gesture to position oneself in a certain way to succeed on the film festival circuit. In this first group, I’d put people like – and please don’t hate me for this, Young Male Cinephiles -- Lisandro Alonso, Lav Diaz, Pedro Costa, and even Bela Tarr, though I…

With the EU exit disaster developing day by day in the UK and slowly finding its legs worldwide, Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary about immigration into the Mediterranean from Africa and the Middle East is a horror story released with uncomfortable timing. The film picked up the Golden Bear earlier this year in Berlin and rather than find a political route into subject, Rosi takes a non-judgemental stance, allowing the imagery to largely speak for itself.

In recent years the island of Lampedusa, just south of Sicily, has become an entrance point into Europe for thousands of refugees. There are three stories being told here; one through the eyes of Samuele, a local 12-year-old boy, a local doctor that attends to the…

Fire at Sea presents the migrant crisis that affected Europe throughout the 2010s. It captured the ordinary elements of those events and the people who witnessed them. Sadly however Fire at Sea is so detached from its subject that it passes almost no comment. Even the choice of footage provides no thesis, since it is all so slow and mundane. The film doesn't come together into anything complete. It remains a bunch of bits, scattershot and meaningless.

Rather than feel like a documentary, Fire at Sea seems constructed as a scripted art film. It all seems too abstract and too technical, losing the human angle of the crisis. One of the few scenes of value has a doctor explain the…

[6]

Fire at Sea is a difficult film to evaluate, since one need watch it for a mere five minutes to get an immediate sense of Rosi's mastery of the medium. (Although he has only shown up on the radar of most North American cinephiles rather recently - either with this film or his previous effort, the Golden Lion winner Sacro GRA - he produced his first feature documentary Boatman back in 1993.) Each and every shot in Fire at Sea is meticulously composed for maximum impact, great care taken with respect to foreground / background relationships, color and tone, shape and movement. Like a softer Ulrich Seidl, Rosi is actively molding reality, not only to press it into the…

it's been a while since I've seen a film which achieves such thematic urgency and relevance, formal audacity, and emotionally devastating final sequences as Fire at Sea does. it's a tough but necessary film.

this incredibly timely quasi-documentary about the European migration crisis uses the juxtaposition of the harrowing journey to a safer land against the banal and ordinary lives of that land's current occupants not as a cheap gimmick, but as a way to remind the viewer of their willful ignorance of the struggles facing the many people who flee Africa and West Asia for Europe. that the dominant focus is on the daily routines of an ordinary, though charismatic, young boy in Lampedusa and not the countless stories…

An observational documentary meets a politically urgent one in Fire at Sea, Gianfranco Rosi’s juxtaposition of African migrants and Sicilian lifeways. In one sphere, a boy named Samuele is living a typical seaside life on the island of Lampedusa, swimming and exploring and slurping up his grandma’s delicious octopus spaghetti. In another, doctor Pietro Bartolo is seeing to the constant flow of migrants and refugees who are brought to the island by the Italian navy. Samuele’s life seems completely unimpacted by his home serving as a way station between continents, partly due to his country’s corralling of migrants into crowded camps of nebulous definition. One wouldn’t want to call them detention camps, but the migrants can’t move about freely. Placing…