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Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film, the Amnesty International Film Prize and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Berlin Film Festival.
On the picturesque Sicilian island of Lampedusa – population 6000 – the sleepy rhythms of ordinary life are being shattered by the wave of migrants sweeping across the Mediterranean Sea. Day after day, boat after boat, tens of thousands of refugees arrive on the shores of this tiny fishing outpost, only to vanish from sight just as quickly. They're passing shadows, yet they have an indelible impact on those who call the island home.
Master documentary maker Gianfranco Rosi returns with Fire at Sea, a wrenching, humane and timely survey of Europe's refugee crisis. Swapping large canvases for an intimate, quiet portrait of a people wrestling with the impossible and the incomprehensible, Rosi's film is filled with startling beauty and quiet humour – a necessary antidote to the inhumanity and the hysteria, and essential viewing for an Australia where the lives of the world's desperate have come to count for so very little.
"A deeply troubling, yet surprisingly beautiful work that you can't help but describe as a wake-up call for a Europe increasingly deadened to compassion." – Sight & Sound
