Fire at Sea
| Fire at Sea | |
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Film poster
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| Directed by | Gianfranco Rosi |
| Produced by | Gianfranco Rosi Paolo Del Brocco Donatella Palermo |
| Written by | Gianfranco Rosi |
| Music by | Stefano Grosso |
| Cinematography | Gianfranco Rosi |
| Edited by | Jacopo Quadri |
| Distributed by | 01 Distribution |
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Release date
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Running time
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108 minutes |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | Italian |
| Box office | $1 million |
Fire at Sea (Italian: Fuocoammare) is a 2016 Italian documentary film directed by Gianfranco Rosi. It won the Golden Bear at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 89th Academy Awards. It was also selected as the Italian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the awards but it was not nominated.
The film was shot on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa during the European migrant crisis, and sets the migrants' dangerous Mediterranean crossing against a background of the ordinary life of the islanders. The main characters are a twelve-year-old boy from a local fishing family and a doctor who treats the migrants on their arrival. In his acceptance speech for the Golden Bear award, Rosi stated that his intention was to heighten awareness of the migrant situation, saying, "It's not acceptable that people die crossing the sea to escape from tragedies."
The film has a 92% rating from Rotten Tomatoes and a rating of 87 out of 100 from Metacritic.
Meryl Streep, chair of the Berlin jury, called the film "a daring hybrid of captured footage and deliberate storytelling that allows us to consider what documentary can do. It is urgent, imaginative and necessary filmmaking." Andrew Pulver, writing for The Guardian, described the documentary as having "a distinctive, humane cinematic style" and being "a collection of tiny details that morph, almost by osmosis, into a shocking excavation of the mechanics of crisis." He praises it for approaching the tragedy indirectly, via the people of Lampedusa. The film was also appreciated by the Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who stated that he would carry with him 27 DVDs of the film to a session of the European Council. Each one of the copies was given to a head of state or government of the European Union.
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Wikipedia