Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare)

FIRE AT SEA (Fuocoammare)              B                            

Italy  France  (108 mi)  2016  d:  Gianfranco Rosi                 Official site [UK]       

The island of Lampedusa has a surface area of 20 square km, lies 70km from the African coast and 120 miles from that of Sicily.  In the past 20 years 400,000 migrants have landed on Lampedusa.  In the attempt to cross the Strait of Sicily to reach Europe it is estimated 15,000 people have died.              —opening innertitles

While it’s impossible to see this film and not think about Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950), this is the kind of film that infuriates some, adding obvious fictional aspects into what is ostensibly a documentary film, where some do it well, like Jia Zhang-ke in 24 CITY (2008) or I WISH I KNEW (2010), or Haskell Wexler who invented the mold in Medium Cool (1969), creating a documentary-fiction hybrid that has become more prominently used today.  While this is more of an impressionistic film essay that often loses its way, what ultimately catches the viewer’s attention is the artful manner in which this film addresses the refugee crisis, arguably the biggest humanitarian crisis in Europe since World War II, with more than 60 million forcibly displaced people around the world by the end of 2014, where nearly 20 million were refugees flooding out of Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan, where at its peak nearly 60,000 refugees per month were arriving in Greece by sea (curtailed significantly by the implementation of the EU-Turkey Deal on Migrant Crisis in March 2016), yet there were also record numbers of deaths from those who drowned while attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea, often on flimsy, home-made crafts or overloaded boats with poor equipment.  Looking exclusively from the vantage point of Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island between Sicily and the African continent, only about 45 miles from Tunisia in Africa and 120 miles from the southern Italian coast, with a population of only 6,000, they are on the front lines in the attempt to rescue refugees arriving in ships at risk, mostly from North Africa or the Middle East, providing rescue teams of helicopters and patrol boats, though often they arrive too late, with reportedly as many as 15,000 people having lost their lives just off the coast of the island.  But this doesn’t provide newsreel coverage like one can view on nightly news broadcasts, but instead creates a glimpse of life in a faraway part of the world that is disrupted by harrowing events occurring just off their shores.  Many will likely be disappointed that there is not more footage devoted to refugees, perhaps only 20% of the film, with the camera continually wandering elsewhere, mostly following a young kid, and while this remains the heart of the picture, the filmmaker takes the unusual steps of making only tangential references to the crisis, showing how easily it gets lost to the banality of everyday existence. 

Winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin for Best Film, the first documentary film to win the 1st Place prize, awarded by a jury headed by Meryl Streep who applauded the film, “It’s 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.”  Born in Eritrea and raised in Italy, Rosi spent a year on the island, initially intending to spend a few weeks and shoot a 10-minute short, but he met Dr. Pietro Bartolo in the island’s emergency room, who recounted many of his experiences over the years, which shifted the focus of the film.  Instead Rosi got to know the residents before ever turning a camera on them, where according to the director, “The films are basically two separate stories — the island, the people of the island — and the migrants arriving on the island.  They never interact, they barely touch each other, and in between there is this [reception] institution, and there is the doctor who is somehow in between the two things.”  While he has months to interact with the residents, the same can’t be said for the refugees, who were much more challenging to film, passing through the personnel of rescue operations, examined for health risks by the doctor, then moved to a detention center where he didn’t know any of them, with most long gone after only two days, heading for the mainland.  The film is more of a character study of the residents on the island, including the doctor, the lone medical practitioner on the island for years, who bridges the cultural divide between escaping refugees in crisis and local residents.  10-year old Samuele Pucillo, whose name we don’t even know until we’re well into the film, is initially seen climbing trees, removing the bark to make a homemade slingshot, then crossing the landscape to find objects to target, such as birds and cactus plants, filmed from a variety of angles.  We also meet his grandmother Maria, who listens to the same radio broadcast every day, calling in to the local deejay to request one of her five favorite songs, including a 50’s song by the same name as the film title, Fuocoammare (OST) by Giuseppe Fragapane on Spotify, that recounts World War II and the dangerous conditions for fishermen who went to sea during artillery fire, often forced to endure “fire at sea.”  For generations, the island residents’ biggest fear was dying at sea.  Now the close proximity to Africa has brought that fear to their doorstep in the form of a trail of refugees who live that reality daily, bringing to life the myths of Virgil and the ancient Greek tragedies of Homer, with adventurers crossing that same sea route from Carthage in northern Africa to Sicily.

        

Other than the doctor and rescue teams, the residents of the island have little contact with the steady flow of refugees, and mostly hear by radio news reports, as otherwise there’s no interaction.  According to Rosi, “Lampedusa became a microcosm of what is Europe:  these two worlds that barely touch each other, but somehow there is never an interaction.”  Samuele is the innocent protagonist of the film, too young to understand the implications of what’s happening around him, and to some degree provides the comic relief, as he’s seen playfully scampering around the island, lighting firecrackers on the beach, willing to talk endlessly to anyone who comes near, seen making wild gestures when expressing himself, also butchering the English language in classes at school, even making a mess while he eats his grandmother’s spaghetti.  The irony is he’s expected to be a fisherman, like his father, grandfather, and all the fathers that came before, but he suffers from the effects of sea sickness, hypertension, has a lazy eye problem, shortness of breath, chronic panic attacks, and amusingly displays the typical behavior of a hypochondriac.  But what he does have is what all the refugees passing through don’t have — a loving family and a home, seen treated by the same doctor that treats all the incoming refugees.  Side by side with Samuele’s daily routines are scenes of a hangar door opening for a rescue helicopter, the coast guard unloading refugees that appear more dead than alive, emotionally devastated by the journey, where not everyone survives.  There is a choreography of routines on display, as new arrivals are slowly processed, sitting behind walled compounds waiting for a judge to decide their fates, lives marked by poverty and war.  A Nigerian preacher sings his lament in oral tradition, surrounded by other Africans, engaging in a solemn group prayer describing how they fled their homes in Eritrea, Mali, Syria, Nigeria, or Sudan, avoiding falling bombs from the sky, so they crossed the Saharan desert, were forced to drink their own piss, were tortured and driven out of Libya, before being forced out to sea.  The only spark of joy captured is a spontaneous soccer game in near darkness at the detention center.  Dr. Bartolo is the moral center of the film, a man of decency and good will, whose sense of purpose is undeniable, whose only comment is an off-handed remark, “It’s the duty of every human being, if you’re human, to help these people.”  By the end, however, as the coast guard unloads a newly arrived boat, we hear first-hand accounts of more horrors at sea, bodies piled on top of bodies, some unconscious, some in convulsions, others in hysterics screaming uncontrollably, a man viciously beaten, unable to speak, signs of chemical burns caused by diesel fuel mixed with sea water, dehydration, hunger, with the camera lingering on the stack of lifeless bodies in the lower deck where all perished.  Stuck in the back of our heads is the sound of that Nigerian chant, “The sea is not a place to pass by… The sea is not a road… On the journey on the sea too many passengers died.  They got lost in the sea.  A boat was carrying 90 passengers.  Only 30 were rescued and the rest died.  Today we are alive.”

Interesting observations from this year’s Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankylä, Finland by Antti Alanen on his website, Antti Alanen: Film Diary: Fuocoammare / Fire at Sea:   

On 16 June when I asked Rosi whether he felt any affinity with neorealism he denied it.  Yet while digesting Fuocoammare I kept thinking about Visconti (La terra trema), Rossellini (Stromboli) and Antonioni (he started as a documentarist, there is a strong documentary impulse in L’avventura, and late in his career he made documentaries such as Ritorno a Lisca Bianca, and Noto, Mandorli, Vulcano, Stromboli, Carnevale). All three directors had a documentary impulse and a strong social consciousness.

Rosi’s answers to the morning discussion’s obligatory questions: 1) the first film you saw: he said that the first film that really impressed him was Antonioni’s La signora senza camelie, 2) the desert island film: Buñuel’s Los olvidados. His summation of a documentarist’s calling was of anthology quality.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley

THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY              A-                   

Ireland  Great Britain  Germany  Italy  Spain  (124 mi)  2006  d:  Ken Loach 

Twas hard for mournful words to frame
To break the ties that bound us,
Ah but harder still to bear the shame
Of foreign chains around us.
And so I said: the mountain glen
I’ll seek at morning early
And join the brave united men
While soft winds shake the barley.
—Robert Dwyer Joyce (1830-1883)

A film that’s bound to draw attention to itself, as it’s a film of ideas wrapped in the blood of brothers-in-arms and history, as well as a lump in your throat story by Paul Laverty that grabs the audience from the haunting opening moments and relentlessly never lets go.  Following on the trail of John Ford’s The Informer (1935) and Italian neorealists like Rossellini’s OPEN CITY (1945) or de Sica’s BICYCLE THIEF (1948), Loach is so superb at painting compassionate portraits of progressive realism, a wrenching view of ordinary people caught up in the turmoil of the times, using a fictionalized recreation of a moment in history that has profound implications on the world we live in today, creating a style of film that defines intensity.  Set in Ireland in 1920, we see the armed to the teeth British Black and Tan soldiers not only harassing Irish youth, which might have been tolerated, but the mainstream professional class as well, bloodying a few noses, using a bullying style of thuggery that eventually leads to murder.  At a local farmhouse that becomes a focal point of the film, Damien, Cillian Murphy, witnesses the murder of one of his friends for saying his name in Gaelic instead of English, and after watching the Black and Tans knock a train conductor senseless for refusing to allow soldiers to bring their weapons on the trains, he changes his plans from attending medical school in London and joins up with the Irish Republican Army where his brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney) is already active as a soldier.  The story follows Damien’s path as he and his brother undergo the painful transition from civilian to soldier, where violence becomes their trademark, which leaves more than a scar in their anguished souls.

Much like Melville’s portrait of the French resistance in ARMY OF SHADOWS (1969), these Republicans face an impossible dilemma, as they’re being rounded up, tortured and killed, all graphically realized in a few short moments of the film, they’re left with a huge burden on their shoulders, where the freedom of the country lies in the hands of a bunch of poor, working class kids, an underfunded rag tag few, or they can face the humiliating alternative of living the rest of their lives under the brutal dictates of a British occupation.  Loach has already shown us what the British can do, so what alternative do they have?  In one of the more wrenching scenes of the film, they have to decide what to do when they discover the identity of an informer, a young kid they’ve known all their lives, as well as his family, whose real sin is he couldn’t endure the kind of torture the IRA was used to.  What to do?  Through a series of raids and ambushes, Damien develops the friendship of Dan (Liam Cunningham) and Sinead (Orla Fitzgerald), whose brother was killed earlier at her grandmother’s farmhouse, which comes into play again in another unforgettable scene when it is burned down by the Black and Tans, leaving Sinead beaten and bloodied.  As we’re being drawn into this life or death intensity of an unstoppable mayhem and neverending revenge, a truce is declared.  The Treaty of 1921 is signed by both the Irish and British, which leads to the withdrawal of the Black and Tan troops, a police force in the hands of the Irish, but the country will remain under the power of the British – the terms of peace.

Suddenly the film changes from the fight for freedom set in the vast green landscapes of the cloudy outdoors, beautifully captured by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, to the cramped back rooms of a dingy building where a progressive political discussion ensues, the heart and soul of the picture, guys in caps and vests arguing vehemently with one another over the terms of the agreement, exploring questions of history and political experiences of the working class as if their lives depended on it, as some feel they are so close to driving the British out that they’d never forgive themselves if they stopped now, while others, overwhelmed by the rising body count, welcome the prospects of peace, believing there are no circumstances under which the British would actually leave, so withdrawing their troops is a good compromise.  Damien and Teddy end up on opposite sides of the argument and both end up pursuing their goals in their own way, which only leads to disastrous results.  The final shot at that same farmhouse, the setting where so much of the pain and violence occurs and a fitting metaphor for Ireland itself, is an extraordinary picture of hurt and sorrow, as one wonders how much more anguish that farmhouse can endure?  The language of the film is in a thick Irish brogue, a good third of which is incomprehensible, and unlike a few other working class British films, there are no subtitles, which makes for a frustrating viewing, as what we can decipher is bold, brash, and at times poetic, so it might have helped, but this is one of Loach’s most powerful films, where the initial intensity never lags due to such a strong undercurrent of staggering realism.

These Birds Walk

THESE BIRDS WALK                       A-         
USA  Pakistan  (72 mi)  2013  d:  Bassam Tariq and Omar Mullick       Official site

This film is an eye opening and transcendent experience, reminiscent of Kiarostami’s magnificent film LIFE, AND NOTHING MORE…(1992), part of his Kokar Earthquake Trilogy that was shot in the ruins of a deadly earthquake that killed more than 50,000 people.  What attracted first time filmmaker Bassam Tariq and longtime photographer Omar Mullick to Pakistan was the benevolent work of Abdus Sattar Edhi, now in his mid 80’s, considered one of the great humanitarians of the world who is often mentioned when speaking of laudable candidates for the Nobel Prize.  In 1951, with 5000 rupees (about $81 dollars), he formed the Bilqis Edhi Foundation, a nonprofit social-welfare program named after his wife, dedicated to serving Pakistan's abandoned and abused women and children, mostly devoted to helping runaway youths, where today the foundation runs over 300 centers.  Edhi discovered that many Pakistani women were killing their babies at birth, often because they were born outside marriage, where one newborn child was stoned to death outside a mosque on the orders of religious leaders.  So he placed a little cradle outside every Edhi centre along with a sign that reads:  “Do not commit another sin:  leave your baby in our care.”  Edhi has so far saved 35,000 babies and found families for approximately half of them.  Regarded as a guardian of the poor, to this day he owns two pairs of clothes, has never taken a salary from his organization, and lives in a small apartment over an overcrowded Karachi clinic.  Notoriously private and dismissive of the idea of talking about himself or his humanitarian efforts, Edhi shuns the attention when the filmmakers point their cameras at him, assuming these people have read about him from thousands of miles away, where he tells them “You came here to film me, but if you really want to know me, then look at the work I'm doing…If you want to find me, you will find me among the people.  I come from ordinary people, and to find me look among ordinary people.”  With this simple proclamation, he alters the direction of the film, as over the course of three years, the filmmakers observe what transpires inside the Edhi center in Karachi, a city of 9 million where one-third of the population live in slums due to the rampant poverty, ethnic rivalries, and ensuing violence. 

What we see are hordes of young children, some beaten, neglected or outright abandoned, all mostly under 12, with a large group of half-starved babies that have been left on their doorstep, where Edhi himself sits on the floor and bathes each and every one of them, where every week in Karachi the Edhi center feeds over 10,000 people, rarely turning anyone away, providing a safety net for the country with an extensive network of orphanages, women's shelters, welfare assistance and hospitals.  Early on we hear the voice of twenty-year old Asad, with no knowledge of his own parents, whose dire situation living on the streets was so desperate that he was ready to take his own life, but he saw a “Help Wanted” sign when passing by the Edhi center and decided to work just for a few days caring for others.  Several years later, he’s been able to move beyond his original trauma by splitting his time between retrieving the dead bodies piled up by ethnic fighting, street crime, and gang warfare, and returning the runaways to their families, by now claiming he’s seen it all, murders on the street, suicides, and horrible accidents.  But lost children have become his teachers, where learning from their circumstances has helped distance him from his own pain, becoming one of the empathetic faces of the institution as he’s able to identify with each child.  Far from being an exclusively harrowing experience, however, the filmmakers do an excellent job of mixing raw footage with often poetic cinematography by Mullick, and a simply awe-inspiring electronic, violin-centered musical score by Todd Reynolds, which adds a touch of experimental films, where an exposé on the human condition becomes artfully presented, often illuminating the overriding feeling of loneliness with solitary images that have a painterly feel.  This juxtaposition of momentary beauty is interspersed throughout with Asad’s steam-of-conscious observations, offering a contrast to the rough edges of the story.    

Most of the subsequent footage focuses on a few of the older kids assigned to the Karachi home, as the center is overrun by kids and there’s little recreational activity for them to do, where the children are fed, with medical care provided, but they’re not comfortable with the idea of calling this place their home, as many remember their families, where most of the children feel abandoned, longing to return home, often seen praying for this salvation.  One of the more agitated kids is Omar, who couldn’t be any more than 10, but he’s often seen bullying others or showing a surprising degree of aggression, using in-your-face profanity, where he brags how his parents beat him (wearing the scars on his face), but he refused to shed more than a single tear.  When picking on others doesn’t work, as there are bigger and older kids at the center who intervene, he’s often left alone, seen crying afterwards, literally overcome by his own misery.  While the Edhi centers can protect these kids from the harsh reality of the outside world, many continue to have suicide tendencies or believe God has abandoned them as well.  One of the most heartbreaking moments is witnessing Asad returning one of these kids back to his family, where the boy is shivering in fright and in tears at the thought of having to be returned to the family that continuously beat him, where the family is not happy about his return either, uttering “I’d have been happier if you’d brought me his corpse,” where as impossible as it seems, home life may actually cause greater grief and sorrow than the solitary isolation of the shelter.  Here it appears there are 20 or 30 people to a one-roomed house in an overpopulated slum, obviously too many mouths to feed, where the boy running away was no accident, but something he was driven to do by an uncaring and hostile family, which, when confronted with Asad’s allegations of beatings and abuse, quickly denies before the cameras that they ever laid a hand on the boy. 

Asad’s final delivery is Omar, who lives deep into Taliban territory, offering a uniquely human and sympathetic face never before associated with that of “the enemy,” where the circuitous journey into the heart of darkness includes an elusive race by Omar disappearing into a massive crowd at the Mazar shrine, which he insists on visiting, eluding authorities to be able to pray next to a shrine before they continue their long and arduous journey through the night and into the next morning before arriving at one of the most desolate places on the planet, where there are no houses or standing structures, only the flattened, bombed-out ruins of a destroyed village, likely from a drone attack or a long forgotten battle scene, where one instantly mourns for any signs of humanity forced to live in these ghastly conditions.  Omar points out his home, where there is no water, gas, electricity, or even a roof, just half destroyed, ramble shack huts where his family suggests he’s actually safer and better off in the shelter than living here, acknowledging they have many more children who remain under the protection of other Edhi shelters, where the family has no intention of looking for them.  It’s only here that one gets the fuller picture of what these kids are running away from, where as painful as it is to admit, life in the overcrowded Edhi shelters may actually bring these children closer to God’s grace, where they are fed and clothed and protected from the appalling conditions of utter destruction, famine, and brutal poverty.  Deeply moving and void of any pretense, these are graphic depictions of a life unimaginable just about anyplace else in the world today, evidence of a kind of prehistoric dawn of man, even worse than the devastating, war ravaged rubble of Rossellini's GERMANY YEAR ZERO (1948), more reminiscent of Hiroshima, as everything is flattened, where no buildings survive.  Out of the calamitous ruins of destruction new life forms may thrive, where one can only hope and pray that one of them is human.  After driving in a car all night and much of the day just to find this place, it’s nearly unfathomable to imagine how Omar and his siblings are actually making the dangerous trek back across the country on foot to find their way back into the protection of the Ebhi shelters so many miles and miles away, where they may as well be lone survivors of the apocalypse, but as the film suggests, they must learn to walk before they can fly. 

Le Week-End

LE WEEK-END                      B+                  

Great Britain  France  (93 mi)  2013  d:  Roger Michell       Website            Trailer

Perhaps Woody Allen’s decision to globetrot throughout Europe to make films has had a bigger effect than we realized, beginning in England with MATCH POINT (2005), and continuing for eight years through Spain, Paris, and Rome, as this audience-pleasing film originates with Allen’s mix of comedy and tragedy while immersing his characters in self-deprecating humor.  English director Roger Michell, collaborating for the fourth time with screenwriter Hanhif Kureishi, has similarly produced an intelligently written comic romance with tragic overtones, all set in the streets of Paris for a couple’s 30th wedding anniversary, which offers both hope and the possibilities of renewal, but also the chance that it could all be coming to an end.  The featured actors express an unusually wide range of emotions with career defining roles, including the dependable and ever reliable Jim Broadbent as Nick and his late blooming wife Meg, Lindsay Duncan, both probably in their 60’s.  Their lives have been defined by work and responsibility, where little time has been spent on their precarious relationship, as they’ve been too busy to think about themselves.  As is often the case, people have differing expectations when they reach retirement age, as Meg is interested in starting anew, learning to play the piano, to try several new languages, or how to dance the Tango, a life where she’ll continually be challenged, while Nick feels a bit overwhelmed by all that ambition, as together they can’t even decide what kind of tiles to use for their bathroom repair.  But what’s immediately evident is the skillful interplay between the two characters, where they no longer hide their feelings behind polite standards of convention, but simply blurt out whatever they feel at the moment, often devastatingly blunt and hurtful, while at other times they melt in each other’s arms. 

From the moment they arrive in Paris, they sense trouble, as the hotel where they spent their honeymoon 30 years ago is a bit shabby and rundown, causing them to immediately shift gears, taking a whirlwind cab ride through Paris pointing out the sites before stopping in front of the most prestigious hotel they’ve seen, which is booked solid except for their most luxurious suite, the one Tony Blair stayed at when visiting Paris.  So they throw caution to the wind and forget about money for a change, as the Eiffel Tower view from the balcony couldn’t be more intoxicating, and instead they enjoy walking through the streets, seeing the sites, and choosing elegant restaurants with elaborately designed meals.  With their marriage at stake, what’s continuously on display is a choreography of mood swings, creating a dangerous minefield to negotiate with both dropping bombs on each other while also having to face the onslaught of incoming fire, mired in a build-up of petty resentments that suddenly have an easy target, as if both are wearing bulls eyes on their backs,  where the petty bickering can be deeply disturbing or laceratingly funny, as they continue to get themselves into ridiculous situations.  Their ongoing sarcasm is both deadly accurate but also self-protective, as it’s easy to hide behind humor.  Nonetheless, Nick is under the assumption that Meg intends to leave him, where for him the idea of facing the future alone feels doomed from the outset, where he continually expresses his love for her, but sadly Meg just leaves him hanging.  While Nick was a progressive activist in his youth turned into a middle aged, largely ignored philosophy professor, it’s clear the fire has gone out of their marriage, where Nick pleads and bargains for a hint of sex that never comes, as if Meg keeps it locked in a storage vault, a throwback to the more prudish Victorian times when women wore chastity belts.    

While the film is a theatrical unraveling of a long drawn-out bitterness that has developed between them, they’re also seen running through the streets like young carefree adolescents, even cleverly escaping from an upscale restaurant without paying the bill, where they’re reverting to behavior from an earlier age, as if this will somehow jumpstart their romance and rejuvenate their marriage.  Bearing a similarity to a younger but equally endangered married couple in Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (2013), or Roberto Rossellini’s seethingly angry divorce among the ruins film Journey to Italy (1954), the common ingredient in each is the raging female disappointment both in the men they married and the emptiness of their lives, where the towering performances by women, including Lindsay Duncan’s superbly realized exposé of middle age fears creeping into her life, are powerful indicators of the kind of searing dramatic intensity that can be shown through intelligently written middle-aged dramas.  While Nick amusingly listens to Dylan on his headset sneering “How does it feel…to be on your own?” Bob Dylan - Like a Rolling Stone (Live 1966)  YouTube (4:19), perhaps hoping to recapture the boldness of youth, there are also images playing on the hotel television of Godard’s 1964 film BAND OF OUTSIDERS (Bande à Part), showing the freewheeling young heroes Running through the Louvre YouTube (53 seconds), a display of their rebellious energy.  The film loses some of its brutal honesty, however, in its insistence to remain commercially entertaining, to remain audience friendly, where there’s a dinner scene ripe for the kind of mad chaos inspired by Maurice Pialat, for instance, in À Nos Amours (To Our Loves) (1983), where 60-year olds never express such a burst of liberating pandemonium, where instead a humiliatingly awkward scene is toned down and given a polite return to maturity, but not before they have a chance to spontaneously restage the infamous jukebox scene with Anna Karina dancing the Madison, a scene that needs no subtitling, Café! Dance scene from Bande à Part (1964) on Vimeo (4:05).  Despite personally impactive scenes of confessional honesty, the film also plays out like a working-class fantasy, imagining what might happen if you had a chance to repair your broken marriage by spending the weekend in one of the most upscale hotels in Paris.