Under Construction @ Keele 2019 summer 2019, vol 5 issue 1 | Page 30

Keywords | Refugee crisis, migrant image, Lampedusa, compassion fatigue, Frames of War
‘[T]he politics of invisibility involves not actual invisibility, but a refusal of those in power to
see who or what is there. The task of the postcolonial is to make the invisible, in this sense,
visible’. 5
Robert Young
Postcolonial scholar Sandra Ponzanesi argues that Gianfranco Rosi’s film Fuocoammare (Fire
at Sea, 2016) ‘has the purpose of recalibrating [a] distorted view of political opportunism [by]
warning against the rising indifference, apathy, and short-sighted policy of the European
Union’. 6 Rosi’s documentary-film tells the story of Samuele – a 12-year-old Italian boy – and
his family who live on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa alongside a narrative of the so-called
migrant ‘crisis’ taking place in Lampedusa’s waters. It has been argued that the film’s dual
narrative responds to the refugee ‘crisis’ between African countries to the Italian island of
Lampedusa as a humanitarian crisis yet the film commodifies Europe’s displaced people.
Fuocoammare does not utilise its opportunity to interrogate the common issues with media
portrayals of Europe’s displaced people. Instead, the film reproduces three most dominant
approaches to represent the migrant ‘crisis’: its gaze substantially overlaps with the
authorities which dehumanise the displaced people; it reproduces images of stunned
refugees which are particularly invasive and unproductive in challenging Europe’s apathy; it
calms the viewer by providing contrasting images of those unaffected by the ‘crisis’ on the
island. In this sense, Fuocoammare fails to depict refugees outside of the stereotype as Rosi
works alongside, rather than against, the gaze of the Italian authorities. Ponzanesi addresses
5
6
Robert JC Young, “Postcolonial Remains,” New Literary History 43: 1 (Winter 2012), 23.
Young, “Postcolonial Remains,” 153.
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