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The Hollywood Reporter feature on Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare, 2016) reads: “Where journalism leaves off, Fire at Sea begins”. The director spent months living alone on Lampedusa looking for ways to film the current refugee tragedy in the Mediterranean. The poetic film that he made (and that won the Golden Bear at Berlin) is an indirect reckoning with its subject, and, I argue no less political for this. Referring to the work of Adriana Cavarero, Christina Sharpe, Anne Dufourmantelle and Judith Butler, this article explores the uses of recorded telephone calls and other transmitted voices and songs in the film. These calls and voices offer forms of appeal and aural, non-visual, but bodily, affective traces. The film emphasises the political importance of listening, and of attending to these calls and voices, envisaging a mesh of connectedness, of threads of human attachment. You don’t know who’s calling or what you are going to be called upon to do, and still, you are lending your ear, giving something up, receiving an order. It is a question of answerability. (Ronell 2) (1) On 30 March 2016, a man in the Marconi district in Rome, Gianni Brusadelli, was woken at six in the morning by telephone calls, voices speaking in English and French, over the sounds of the wind and a boat motor. He called the police who came to his apartment. They called the coast guard and a ship was located. Six hundred refugee passengers on several ships were saved. Brusadelli had received the call purely by chance, the number composed randomly on a ship in the middle of the Mediterranean, only the Rome dialling code apparently deliberate. The call came at dawn from the middle of the Mediterranean (Frignani). Gianfranco Rosi’s 2016 film about Lampedusa, Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare), first registers the tragedy in the waters around the Italian island with a telephone call from a refugee boat to a coastguard rescue vessel.1 Further calls follow in the film. These calls resonate in relation to other transmitted voices in Fuocoammare, and in the context of telephone calls and chatroom conversations in other films by Rosi, Below Sea Level (2008), a film about outsiders living in Slab City in the Sonoran desert, California, and Sacro GRA (2013), a film about the ring road around Rome. Considering these various calls together allows reflection on the ways in which, for Rosi in Fuocoammare, the refugee tragedy in Europe is part of a broader history and geography of exclusion, precarity, and the possibility and failure of humanitarian response. In Fuocoammare, Rosi dwells on the specificity of the alarm and horror around Lampedusa. He participated in more than sixty rescue missions during the several years of the making of the film and the material reality of these is part of his subject. Yet he also deals in echoes and involuntary recall, pursued psychic and sensory patterns that refuse boundaries and exclusion. Telephone calls return serially in his films.

Telephone calls in Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare, 2016)