Winner, Golden Bear, 2016 Berlin Int’l Film Festival & Italian submission for 2016 Oscar – Best Foreign-Language Film

Opens Friday October 21 in Toronto at TIFF Bell Lightbox & November 9 at the Vancity Theatre in Vancouver

Gianfranco Rosi’s new award-winning documentary Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) will open on Friday, October 21, 2016 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox following its Canadian Premiere at TIFF 2016 in the Masters Programme. Fire at Sea also opens in Vancouver on November 9 at the Vancity Theatre.

Familiar to audiences for his powerfully intimate documentaries, Rosi uses his skills of quiet observation to shine a unique perspective on the European refugee crisis in Fire at Sea.

The fishermen of Lampedusa, an Italian island between the shores of North Africa and Sicily have looked for centuries to the sea for their livelihood. But they now share the sea with a new and tragic bounty – migrants fleeing North Africa, heading for refuge in Europe. Rosi lived in Lampedusa for a year, and spent two months on a coast guard rescue boat to learn the rhythms of this community whose citizens are bearing witness to the greatest humanitarian tragedy of our times. At the same time Rosi’s film, which is commentary-free, describes how, even in the smallest of places, two worlds barely touch.

Poetic and raw, the story Rosi tells in Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) is captured through the eyes of Samuele, a typical 9-year-old boy who would rather be climbing rocks by the shore, and playing with his slingshot than going to school; and the island’s only doctor, and de facto coroner, Dr. Pietro Bartolo, a man whose compassion hasn’t wavered after 20 plus years of tending to boatloads of traumatized refugees.

Gianfranco Rosi’s observations of everyday life bring us closer to this place that is as real as it is symbolic, and to the emotional world of some of its inhabitants who are exposed to a permanent state of emergency. Fire at Sea is a lyrical, poetic, searing, and powerful documentary that casts neither judgement nor aspersions, but simply shows this world to the viewer.