Gianfranco Rosi discusses the making of Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare): finding his protagonist, developing the film’s aesthetic, creating the sound mix, and discovering the film’s title. This is an excerpt from the ebook In Their Own Words: Documentary Masters Vol. 1. To read the full interview, purchase a copy of the ebook here.
“I wanted to somehow shift the point of view,” Gianfranco Rosi, the director of Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) explained. In the last 20 years, over 500,000 refugees have passed through Lampedusa en route to Europe. But most of what’s known about Lampedusa in the rest of the world has been largely focussed on the migrant crisis; its the closest part of Europe to Libya, and just 113 km away from Tunisia. It was as if the people who live on this 20km2 island didn’t really exist.
[clickToTweet tweet=”I wanted to somehow shift the point of view. I didn’t want this place to just be a collector of stories linked to tragedies of the migrants.” quote=”I wanted to somehow shift the point of view. I didn’t want this place to just be a collector of stories linked to tragedies of the migrants. “]
Gianfranco Rosi on telling the full story of Lampedusa: the locals and the migrants
In the film, Rosi wanted us to “encounter the people of the island, and then through them, tell the story of the migrants. I didn’t want this place to just be a collector of stories linked to tragedies of the migrants. I wanted also to have an identity for the people who live there.” When Lampedusa first became a hub for immigration, there was some interaction between the migrants at the locals. However, that changed “three or four years ago,” Rosi recalled, “when the European Union moved the European border into the middle of the sea. There’s this patrolling of the military so that the boats are intercepted in the middle of the sea and then brought into Lampedusa, and then from Lampedusa back to the mainland. Somehow, these two realities get separated.”
Gianfranco Rosi on Lampedusa as a microcosm of Europe
For Rosi, this separation between the migrants and the locals meant that “Lampedusa became a microcosm of what is Europe: these two worlds that barely touch each other, but somehow there is never an interaction.” He wanted to explore this by making a local boy, Samuele Pucillio, the protagonist of the film. Rosi explained, “he has this link with the past and the identity of the place. The world of the kids is the world that brings us beyond Lampedusa and enables us to face the sense of the tragedies that is coming through the island through the daily lives of the people. These two parallel worlds never meet and never interact, but there’s an emotional mood that creates a link between the two of them.”
To read the rest of the interview with Gianfranco Rosi on Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare), purchase a copy of the ebook In Their Own Words: Documentary Masters Vol. 1 here.
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Over the course of a year and a half, Rosi shot “80 or 90 hours” of footage, which is a relatively small amount. Consider that Frederick Wiseman shot 170 hours for National Gallery over the course of about 6 weeks. “You have to find the moment when you feel something is going to happen,” Rosi explained. “Most of the time, for me, is about losing moments. When you’re in a place, it’s not possible to constantly shoot. It’s important to create a relationship with the people, to know them and their lives, to build trust. You have to know when is the right moment to enter with the camera and when is the right moment to leave, the time to detach from it, and then go back to it.”
[clickToTweet tweet=”Most of the time, for me, is about losing moments.” quote=”Most of the time, for me, is about losing moments.”]
Building relationships with Lampedusa’s migrants
The fact that the migrants pass through Lampedusa very quickly made it difficult for Rosi to build relationships with them in order to delve deep into their lives. “They were there a maximum of two days, and then they left,” Rosi explained. Ironically, the central tragedy of the film is what brought Rosi closest to his migrant subjects. “One day, we encountered death in the sea. There’s human slaughter in that water,” Rosi recalled. Because Rosi was present at the time of this Nigerian ship’s rescue, in the sea, it allowed him to form a strong bond with these migrants. “I was with them for two to three days. I was invited to talk, to this room where they were doing the praying and chanting, so I was able to film that moment.”
[clickToTweet tweet=”One day, we encountered death in the sea. There’s human slaughter in that water.” quote=”One day, we encountered death in the sea. There’s human slaughter in that water.”]
But most of the time, it wasn’t possible to form such strong ties. This meant that Rosi was often in a somewhat exploitative position, often without having time to ask the migrants for their explicit consent beforehand. But he felt it was important to capture the horrors of the migrant experience.
In one scene, Rosi films a group of new migrants being body searched by police officers. “I had a permit to be there, to be shooting. I asked the police if I could film that, and strangely enough, they told me ‘yes.’ Then, when I was inside the place, I felt very embarrassed to film. People were constantly looking at the camera. They didn’t know why my camera was there. At certain moments, they thought that my camera was the camera of the police.” Rosi deliberately draws attention to the discomfort that he and the migrants felt in this scene. “I wanted to accentuate this element of discomfort in the film. When we watch these people looking at us, not at the camera. It’s almost intrusive.”
Capturing portraits
“I always do portraits,” Rosi said. In Fire at Sea, Rosi follows Samuele, Samuele’s father and grandmother, a local fisherman, a handful of migrants, and the only dotor in Lampedusa who is the one major link between the two group.
Because Rosi wants to create an emotional connection with each of his characters, where to put the camera in relation to the subjects “is very important. This is a very tricky thing when you do documentaries. The distance you find is where you find the truth of what you’re doing. It’s a very important element for me: the distance between the camera and the subject, the right angle, the right height, the right point of view, the emotional point of view of the character. It’s not a rational thing, but it’s something you have to discover every time.”
[clickToTweet tweet=”It’s a very important element for me: the distance between the camera and the subject.” quote=”It’s a very important element for me: the distance between the camera and the subject.”]
“I’m a one-man crew,” said Rosi. He operates the camera and records the sound himself. Filming with the Arriflex Amira camera made doing this possible. “It’s a very good camera, but it is not a very light camera. It has an incredible sensitivity for the night, for the darkness. I was able to shoot at night without using any light.”
Creating narrative stillness
[clickToTweet tweet=”I wanted to create this sense of long shots, of long sequences, which is like life. ” quote=”I wanted to create this sense of long shots, of long sequences, which is like life. “]
Rosi wanted to shoot Fire at Sea with a formal, classical approach, which meant keeping the camera still and stable so that life could play out uncut in the frame. “I wanted to create a stillness of narration. Everything was on the tripod. I didn’t want to have a shaking camera that moves around. I didn’t want to have the sense of improvising. I let things happen in front of the camera. Very rarely, I do a pan, unless something happens here I have to cover something else. I wanted always within this frame to be able to tell a story beginning middle and end. I wanted to create this sense of long shots, of long sequences, which is like life. Through the camera and sound, I wanted to give the film a narrative thickness.”
Capturing the harshness of winter in Lampedusa
“I wanted to shoot in the winter,” Rosi added. “The island changes completely in the summer. There are tourists. In the winter, people are more on their own inner world. It was easier to have a deeper interaction with them, and they have more time to share with you.” This also meant capturing the landscape in all its harshness: “the sea, the wind, the rocks, the life in the island. It became all part of a narration to give an identity of this place. In the winter, there are clouds, so the clouds became part of the story. I was waiting for the cloudy days to shoot. I wanted to give this sense of winter, of cold.”
[clickToTweet tweet=”I was waiting for the cloudy days to shoot. I wanted to give this sense of winter, of cold.” quote=”I was waiting for the cloudy days to shoot. I wanted to give this sense of winter, of cold.”]
Designing the sound mix
Sound design was also crucial to developing the film’s tone. “I work a lot on the sound in post production,” Rosi explained. Rosi estimated that he spent more time editing the sound than he did editing the film itself. “I wanted it to sound almost like a feature film. There was a lot of work on the sound of the wind and the water. I record a lot of separate sound. The sound became like a parallel narrative to the film. I didn’t want the sound to become overwhelming, but always underlining the subconscious.” For example, in the scene where a fisherman dives underwater, “the underwater sound is a completely mysterious sound. It’s more than 300 sounds together mixed in the scene underwater. That was a very surreal moment.” Similarly, “the first time we see the group of Nigerians that we will see at the end of the film,” Rosi recalled, “I wanted to create a surreal moment of sound — almost the sound of the head, the space inside the head.”
There’s a great scene, early in the film, which captures the separation between the migrants and the people on the island. We watch routers turning and hear the sounds of a distress call from a migrant boat at sea. “I immediately felt that those routers were capturing sound that came from aliens, from outside. Of course, the sound is not captured by those routers. It’s a superposition that I did myself. But I like to counterbalance this very strong, high technology with the desperation of a voice that we never met. It’s a militarized island, so there’s a presence of military there, and I wanted to give this feeling. There are these two worlds that don’t encounter each other [except through] this sound of desperation.”
Discovering “Fuocoammare”
The film’s title, Fire at Sea or Fuocoammare in Italian, came from the eponymous song about the island that Rosi kept hearing played throughout the shoot. “I started getting curious about the song and asking what was the meaning of the song. Nobody knew. I knew that it was related to a tragedy in the Second World War. There was a fire on a boat, which was bombed by the British airplanes. One day, when I was filming the kid and the grandmother, by complete accident, she told the story to him. So it was a tragic moment. But it’s a very light song, a very easy song.”
[clickToTweet tweet=”I liked the title of the song, ‘Fire at Sea.’ It’s an oxymoron. It’s evocative of a tragedy. ” quote=”I liked the title of the song, ‘Fire at Sea.’ It’s an oxymoron. It’s evocative of a tragedy. “]
“I liked the title of the song, ‘Fuocoammare’, ‘Fire at Sea.’ It’s an oxymoron. I thought it would be the perfect title. It’s evocative of a tragedy. In the film, there is a lightness through the kids. Theirs is a light point of view. It’s not a heavy story. I wanted to use this lightness to counterbalance the drama, the tragedy of death.”
Read more: Gianfranco Rosi on how to edit a documentary and editing Fire at Sea >>
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