Film: Fire at Sea

Group hosts a showing of refugee film Fire at Sea

On Friday 3rd February the group hosted a showing of the film Fire at Sea in the Arts Centre in Salisbury.  This film won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin film festival and tells the story of immigrants seeking to reach Europe, in this case the island of Lampedusa.  There are in effect two parallel story lines: one involving a small boy of around 12 who spends his time, with a friend, making and shooting a catapult and on his father’s fishing boat.  The other involves the immigrants packed onto boats bobbing about for days in the Mediterranean in their desperate efforts to reach Europe.  Some die of dehydration and others get burned by diesel fuel splashes as they refill the engines.  These burns can be serious and even fatal.  There are harrowing scenes of bodies being retrieved from the boats.

The feature of the film is that the two stories never overlap.  The islanders carry on their lives completely divorced from the drama that is taking place in the sea around them and in the holding centre where the immigrants are looked after.  The doctor is featured who is involved with vetting the immigrants and speaks matter of factly about the dire state of their health and how some of them die.  He is then shown treating the boy who is concerned about his breathing difficulty, which we are led to believe is imaginary.  These two contrasting scenes seem to sum up the theme of the film.

We took the opportunity to ask people to sign a petition on the refugee situation in Greece.

We are grateful to the Arts Centre for hosting this event.

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