Documentary about refugee crisis wins top prize in Berlin
Print Edition
THE Berlin film festival wrapped up yesterday after “Fire at Sea,” a harrowing documentary about Europe’s refugee crisis, clinched its Golden Bear top prize from a jury led by Meryl Streep.
As Europe grapples with its biggest migrant influx since World War II, the film by Italian director Gianfranco Rosi offers an unflinching look at life on Lampedusa, the Mediterranean island where thousands of asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East have arrived trying to reach Europe over the past two decades.
Thousands more have perished on the dangerous journey in rickety, overcrowded boats.
Eritrean-born Rosi, who spent several months on Italy’s Lampedusa making the film, dedicated the prize to its residents “who open their hearts to other peoples.”
“I hope to bring awareness,” he said as he accepted the trophy from Streep. “It is not acceptable that people die crossing the sea trying to escape from tragedies.”
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 new arrivals for 25 years.
In chilling footage, 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.
Three-time Oscar-winner Streep said her seven-member jury was “swept away” by “Fire at Sea,” which she called “urgent, imaginative and necessary filmmaking.”
“It’s a daring hybrid of captured footage and deliberate storytelling that allows us to consider what documentary can do,” she said.
The win for “Fire at Sea” came after the Cannes film festival last May awarded its Palme d’Or to “Dheepan,” a drama about Sri Lankan refugees living in Paris.
Rosi, who captured the Venice film festival’s 2013 Golden Lion for his film “Sacro GRA,” said when his film premiered that Europe’s refugee crisis marked one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes since the Holocaust.
He said he plans to show the film to the people of Lampedusa in an open-air screening in the spring.
The Berlin festival, now in its 66th year, placed a special spotlight on the refugee issue, after Germany let in more than 1.1 million asylum seekers last year. Donations boxes to support charities helping torture survivors were placed at cinema venues, and festival internships and free tickets were reserved for migrants.
George Clooney, whose “Hail, Caesar!” opened the event, even met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel with his wife Amal “to talk about how best we can help.”
In other prizes, France’s Mia Hansen-Love won the Silver Bear for best director for her drama “Things to Come” starring Isabelle Huppert as a philosophy teacher whose marriage falls apart just as her elderly mother dies.
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