Gianfranco Rosi – “People are dying like rats” – Süddeutsche.de

For his documentary “wildfire” on the island of Lampedusa refugee Gianfranco Rosi won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. Rosi has seen horrible.

interview Paul Katzenberger

the Chancellor has the film for months on DVD, presented as a gift from the Italian Premier Matteo Renzi. Even the Pope has already seen the award-winning documentary “Fuoccoamare”, “wildfire”. The attention is the director Gianfranco Rosi a bit uncomfortable. Because in the first place he had made a film about a little boy, he says. However, this 12-year-old Samuele living in a special place – on the island of Lampedusa, where for years the refugee crisis has reached terrible proportions in the Mediterranean

Rosi came in November 2014 to make a short film.. Then he stayed a year and half. From his film was a two-hour documentary. In it he describes the specific scenario on site. In addition to its main protagonists Samuele he accompanied especially the island of Dr. Pietro Bartolo and the crew of an Italian patrol ship under the naval operation “Mare Nostrum” for rescuing refugees at sea

SZ:. Why did they half years remain on Lampedusa

Gianfranco Rosi: Lampedusa last stood still for death. Ongoing arrived journalists who remained only a day or two, and the image of an island spread whose urgent problem is to illegal immigration. But this is incomplete. No one has taken that live there have always been people who identify with the island. With my film I wanted the residents as much as possible back to her self. It takes so long to gain the trust of people who are in a difficult life situation.

“wildfire” shows a few scenes in which the refugees have contact with the locals. Why?

Because it does not come to that contact. By 2013, the refugees from Libya came directly to Lampedusa. They reached the island either in port or on the beaches, where they naturally met with the local population. Some slept in boats, some slept on the street. The people gave them food. But since Mare Nostrum, Triton and Frontex (the Seerettungsmission the Italian Navy and the border security agencies of the EU, n. D. Red.) Refugees fish up already in the sea, the migrants

Why? Can they on Lampedusa not move freely?

After the Navy has taken it on board, they transferred them to the port of Lampedusa, where they receive medical care. From there, they convey buses to the hotspot, where they spend two days. From there it goes either to the Italian mainland or Sicily. As a new section of their odyssey begins: You are identified and begin the asylum procedure

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