Student Film Reviews

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1. Elijah Kimmel 02.20.17 / 7pm

   I agree with a lot of what you say. 12-year-old Samuelle was an extremely charming little boy, watching him talk to his eye doctor is hilarious. Samuelle talks as if he is an adult but has a child like sense of wonder when it comes to playing with his slingshot and pretending to shoot down boats. You are right that some scenes are hard to watch, the scene that stayed in my mind were the unconscious malnourished bodies that the coast guard are pulling off the boat. Very powerful doc with amazing cinematography.
2. Finso Gyaltsen 02.20.17 / 9pm

   I just got done watching this movie and I enjoyed your review. I was wondering if you had any thoughts about the diver and what the director’s purpose was for including him. I believe he was picking urchins up off the ocean floor, so perhaps he was a metaphor for the rescue ships searching for immigrants in the open water. There was the early scene of the boat’s light beaming out into the empty water which was later matched by the divers light beaming through the water from underneath. What do you make of all this?
3. Hanna Olsson 02.21.17 / 9pm

   I agree that some scenes were hard to watch but it was import ant to see what refugees face and the hardships that they go through to survive. I think the director did a great job of capturing their difficult journey. However, Samuel did lighten up the intensity of the movie by showing his charming and adorable character. I like how the movie contrasted the daily life of a young boy with no worries in the world and then with refugees fighting for their life, young and old. Very powerful.
4. Luther Richert 10.15.19 / 5pm

   With the insane politics and media coverage surrounding our own southern order it’s easy to forget (or even be oblivious too) the fact that migration is happening on a massive scale all around the world. As you highlight in your review the Mediterranean Sea has become one of the world’s most deadly border crossing point for migrants. As we see in graphic detail in Fire at Sea, thousands upon thousands of desperate individuals are risking their lives in these flimsy, overcrowded boats, fleeing some mixture of war, oppression, civil disorder and poverty just as they are on our own southern border. Fire at Sea captures the magnitude of this tragedy and suffering and the stark contrast between the haves and have not’s in a way the media has, in my opinion, failed to do.

   Beyond it’s service to educate and inform us, I think it’s worth noticing that Fire at Sea is also a particularly powerful work of art. It represents the migrant crisis using many of the aesthetics of realism that characterized the Italian Neorealism movement. These aesthetics include filming on location, long takes, the innocence of youth, non-linear / non-narrative story telling and a focus on poverty and oppression. Rather than simply reporting the migrant crisis it offers the audience something more similar to an actual experience of a place where these events are happening. It juxtaposes the peace and stability of Italians on the island versus the terror, desperation and alimentation of the migrants arriving by the thousands just around the corner. An experience that impacted me deeply and I won’t soon forget.

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