Under Construction @ Keele 2019 summer 2019, vol 5 issue 1 | Page 31

this distance between Rosi and the refugees and claims that it is due to the fact that
Fuocoammare is ‘more of an arthouse film, allowed to experiment with observational
documentary style of great beauty and impact’ 7 . Postcolonial critic Emma Wilson also praises
the film’s gaze as she takes the stance that the film distances itself from representing
refugees. According to Wilson:
Fire at Sea is not a film that claims to know, feel, or speak of the experiences of
the people travelling in boats to Europe [but] rather a film that challenges the
processes of delay, denial, and disavowal that have allowed the Mediterranean to
become a mass grave 8 .
However, whether Rosi claims to ‘know’, ‘feel’, and ‘speak of’ the refugees who he depicted
in his film or not, his shots produce images that can have a huge impact on Europe’s
perception of the refugee ‘crisis’ and how Europe responds to the ‘crisis’ and its displaced
people. As Hannah Arendt puts it in The Origins of Totalitarianism:
[Those who are stripped of human rights] are deprived, not of the right to
freedom, but of the right to action; not of the right to think whatever they please,
but of the right to opinion. Privileges in some cases, injustices in most, blessings
and doom are meted out to them according to accident and without any relation
whatsoever to what they do, did, or may do. 9
7
Ponzanesi, “Of Shipwrecks and Weddings,” 165.
Emma Wilson, “From Lampedusa to the California Desert: Gianfranco Rosi's Scenes of Living and Dying”, Film
Quarterly, 71:3, (Spring 2018), 6.
9
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College, 1973), 296.
8
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