Under Construction @ Keele 2019 summer 2019, vol 5 issue 1 | Page 29

Turning a blind eye: Reiterating “compassion fatigued” images of refugees in
Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare
Alisha Mathers
In 2016, filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi depicted the ever-growing human displacement from
African countries to the Italian island of Lampedusa in his documentary Fuocoammare (Fire
at Sea). Rosi’s film delivers a dual narrative as he captures both the everyday life of an Italian
family on the island alongside the realities of refugees 1 crossing the Mediterranean Sea to
Lampedusa. Fuocoammare aims to encourage Europe’s empathy for its displaced people as it
literally draws the two narratives side-by-side. According to critic Sandra Ponzanesi, the film’s
dual gaze succeeds in creating new discourses regarding the refugee ‘crisis’ as she claims that
the film functions as a ‘warning against the rising indifference [...] and short-sighted policy of
the European Union.’ 2 However, this essay argues that Rosi’s gaze reiterates Europe’s
“compassion fatigue” (Lodge 1996) as the film commodifies displaced people. In Frames of
War (2016), Judith Butler writes that: ‘If certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the
start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, these lives are never
lived nor lost in the full sense.’ 3 This article adopts Butler’s idea regarding our politically
induced perceptions of certain lives to argue that Rosi’s film Fuocoammare does not
particularly break away from such epistemological frames, but rather that its gaze
predominantly reiterates the image of a migrant as someone who is stripped of their identity
and rights to have human rights (Arendt 1973; Butler 2009). While Ponzanesi celebrates the
film for sharpening the ‘lazy eye of Europe’ 4 concerning the so-called refugee ‘crisis’, this
essay proposes that Rosi’s gaze turns a blind eye to understanding and tackling mass human
displacement. This article contributes to current debates on media (mis)representations of
migrants by examining the problematic issues of the award-winning film Fire at Sea (2016) to
reveal the ongoing pitfalls of media portrayals of human displacement.
1
The terms ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ are used interchangeably; while being aware of the terms’ legal
differences, for the purpose of this paper they are used more broadly.
2
Sandra Ponzanesi, “Of Shipwrecks and Weddings: borders and mobilities in Europe,” Transnational Cinemas,
7.2. (2016), 153.
3
Judith Butler, Frames of War (London: Verso, 2009), 1.
4
Ponzanesi, “Of Shipwrecks and Weddings,” 161.
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