http://thepeninsulaqatar.com/article/18/02/2017/Filmmaker-Rosi-brings-Med-migrant-crisis-to-Oscars
Filmmaker Rosi brings Med migrant crisis to Oscars
18 Feb 2017 - 9:15
[image: Filmmaker Rosi brings Med migrant crisis to Oscars]
File photo of Italian master Gianfranco Rosi. Reuters
AFP
Los Angeles: A female voice crackles over the radio, begging for rescue
from a crowded migrant boat sinking into the Mediterranean as the
coastguard barks over and over: "What is your position?"
Like much of Italian master Gianfranco Rosi's cinematic, Oscar-nominated
documentary "Fire at Sea," this opening scene plays out like a narrative
thriller, except the lives in danger are real.
"I wanted to reverse the question. We should be asking ourselves, 'What is
my position about this tragedy?' We can no longer be the silent majority,"
Rosi told AFP in Los Angeles ahead of next week's awards.
As Europe grapples with its biggest migrant influx since World War II,
Rosi's harrowing film offers an unflinching look at life on the Italian
island of Lampedusa.
Thousands of asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East have arrived in
Italian waters trying to reach the European Union over the last two decades.
Many others -- some 4,000 last year -- have perished on the dangerous
journey in rickety, overcrowded boats.
Eritrean-born Rosi has toured the world with the film, which competes for
the best documentary Oscar with American entrants "I am Not Your Negro,"
"13th," "Life, Animated" and the favorite, "O.J.: Made in America."
One of the most decorated documentary filmmakers in the business, Rosi, who
is in his early 50s, won the top prize from a jury led by Meryl Streep at
the Berlin Film Festival last year.
His star was already on the ascendant after he took home the Venice Film
Festival's 2013 Golden Lion for "Sacro GRA," which looks into everyday life
off a Rome ring road.
*Horror*
Rosi spent a year living on Lampedusa, just another tiny island barely
meriting its inclusion on the map, he thought when he started filming in
2014 -- before millions began heading into Europe across the Balkans.
"I realized only in Berlin how the movie became political and I could feel
politics breathing into the frame," Rosi said.
"Before, Lampedusa was just Italy. Now it's a universal problem, a
metaphor, almost."
The picture is told through the eyes of a 12-year-old local boy, Samuele
Pucillo, and a doctor, Pietro Bartolo, who has been tending to the
dehydrated, malnourished and traumatized arrivals for a quarter-century.
"How do you get used to seeing pregnant women, dead children?" Bartolo
laments, admitting that the horror has infected his dreams.
Rosi accompanied coastguard rescue missions answering the terrified SOS
calls of people on boats, most of them arriving from Libya. Many of the
vessels are packed with corpses of people who suffocated from diesel fumes.
Rosi said the film's nomination for a best documentary Oscar was an
opportunity to "carry the call for help from Lampedusa... to Hollywood."
The US spotlight on the movie comes with the refugee crisis a hot-button
public policy issue following President Donald Trump's elevation to the
White House.
The Republican leader stood on an anti-immigration ticket, vowing to build
a wall on the southern border with Mexico. In one of his first acts in
office, Trump issued an order banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority
countries, though it's since been withdrawn after hitting legal objections.
"This is a tragic moment here as well. America was always the land of
freedom, the land of immigrants. What happens when it turns its back on
history to build barriers?" Rosi asks.
*'It is a cemetery' *
"There is a symmetry with the migrants of the California desert, it is a
cemetery," Rosi said, reflecting on the US version of the Mediterranean
crisis -- migrants dying in the desert as they attempt to get in from
Mexico.
Rosi's filmmaking style sets "Fire at Sea" apart from more traditional
documentaries, dispensing with the usual tropes of interviews to camera,
on-screen text and a narrator.
Rosi says that when he is behind the camera he is looking for moments of
truth that show more than a long monologue could ever say, drawing on
poetic language to create an "emotional connection with reality."
"I like to close the door of information and interact more with emotion
with the audience... beyond any number, there is a person, some eyes
looking at you," he says.
Rosi lived through his own migrant crisis at age 13, evacuated by Italian
soldiers from his east African homeland without his parents during the
Eritrean War of Independence against Ethiopian troops.
He does not consider himself a refugee, he says, but felt a strong
connection to Africa as he was on a boat filming "Fire at Sea" as people
around him were dying.
"People tell refugees, 'Why do you confront the sea?' and 'You might die.'
Once a person answered me: 'Might? Might for us is hope. If we stay in
Libya we will die, if we cross we only might die.'"
Received on Sat Feb 18 2017 - 23:08:32 EST