Fire At Sea: Oscar-Worthy?

So it’s going to be a documentary that will represent Italy at this year’s Academy Awards.

Paolo Sorrentino, who served on the selection committee seems be at odds with the choice and to have agreed with me; he called Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) a “beautiful film”, but said that the choice was an “unnecessary downgrading” of Italian cinema, since Fire at Sea will be considered for best documentary. He said that Edoardo De Angelis’s film Indivisibili would have had a good chance, and Italy could have sent two films to the Oscars.

That’s what I said.

But Sorrentino is right, Fire at Sea is a beautiful, heartbreaking documentary about the European migrant crisis, a hot button issue all over the world, particularly timely and important, so we’ll see. While we in the United States tend to debate who does and does not have the right to live in our country, Italians on the little gateway island of Lampadusa are concerned with the more immediate task of saving the lives of desperate boat people arriving on their shore dead and alive and in perilous conditions.

I talked with director Gianfranco Rosi after he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for his documentary Sacro GRA, the first documentary to ever win that award, and he told me that he’d never make a non-documentary. “It would be too boring”, he said.

That year at Venice, the jury president Bernardo Bertolucci called it a “film with no judgement”, and this is Rosi’s mission. He told me that he doesn’t like documentaries like the ones that Michael Moore makes, and that he wants to “capture positive elements of the world” instead.

In Fire at Sea, Rosi leaves the politics to the politicians and presents the reality of the men and women who arrive from dangerous situations in their homelands and will need to be absorbed into an already taxed Europe, but as one person says in the film, “If we don’t help them, who will?”

This help comes at a price, one that Italy is having a hard time with; housing for the immigrants on Lampadusa, meant for 800, often accommodates 3000, and this on an island with a population of only 6000.

This film will surely be considered in the documentary category, but you can decide for yourself. It begins a limited engagement in US theaters on October 21, so check the blog for cities and dates. Do you think it’s Oscar material? Let me know!