Of islands and bears: the aesthetics and politics of Gianfranco Rosi's Fuocoammare

This chapter analyses the aesthetics and politics of Gianfranco Rosi’s film Fuocoammare [Fire at Sea], a portrayal of the mutually impenetrable worlds of migrant tragedy and local ordinariness in Lampedusa, which won the Golden Bear at the 2016 Berlinale. In the context of the new policy of welcoming and compassion announced by the German government following the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, the festival was explicitly designed to foreground the increasing borderization of the outer margins of Europe and the criminalization of migrants. Reflecting on the almost unanimous enthusiasm that greeted the film and the few dissenting voices which, particularly in Italy, were raised to contend that Rosi’s aesthetic accomplishment and haunting, unobtrusive gaze did not take enough of a stand against the EU’s responsibilities in the Mediterranean, the chapter addresses the complex and disturbing beauty of Fuocoammare, and the film’s ability to effectively respond to the current migrant catastrophe, in the light of the director’s own sophisticated theoretical intake on the cinema of the real.