Eyes, Sounds, Voices: Cinematic Representations of the Lampedusa Borderscape

Abstract

“Eyes, Sounds, Voices: Cinematic Representations of the Lampedusa Borderscape” continues the conversation on Europe’s southern border through the eyes, sounds, and voices captured by the multiple actors populating Lampedusa’s borderscape. The chapter discusses three films that foreground encounters and boundary crossings at the same time as they open up to a multiplicity of visions and imaginaries aimed at rethinking individual and collective agency: Gianfranco Rosi’s internationally acclaimed Fuocoammare/Fire at Sea (2016), which won the 66th Golden Bear at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival; Dagmawi Yimer’s Soltanto il mare/Nothing but the Sea (2011), winner of the Migrants and Travelers award at the Festival of African Cinema in Verona; and Zakaria Mohammed Ali’s To Whom It May Concern/A chi possa interessare (2012). Ali’s and Yimer’s films in particular offer powerful aesthetic interventions in the contemporary discourse surrounding illegalized migrations in the Mediterranean. Whereas institutional forces and humanitarian organizations deny refugees the ability to construct themselves as subjects through narrative, turning them into “speechless emissaries,” as anthropologist Lisa Malkki argued two decades ago (“Speechless” 378), films such as To Whom It May Concern and Nothing but the Sea empower refugees such as Ali and Yimer to regain their stories and counteract the process of dehistoricization to which they are often subject. By (re)claiming their space within the transnational network of contemporary migrations and discourses, refugees affirm the articulations of local and global forces that bind people, histories, and landscapes and upon which shared values of human dignity, respect, and tolerance can be promoted.KeywordsBorder fluidityPoetic documentaryReversed Ethnographic GazeMemory Reclamation