Samuele — a twelve-year-old local boy — is looking for something in a tree. The foliage is chilly blues and greens; he wears a coat. The sea is white noise in the background. This is Lampedusa, in Italy, one of the main ports of arrival for migrants crossing the Mediterranean. White-on-black captions inform us: “In the last 20 years, 40,000 migrants have arrived on Lampedusa… it is estimated that 15,000 people have died.” The island, once a fishing community, is now a hospital, refugee camp, and processing centre for people coming from Syria, the Ivory Coast, Libya, Eritrea, and all across the continent, a journey that bottle-necks in northern Africa and ends — for now — in Lampedusa. 

The Greeks referred to the sea as having two faces: polluted and polluting, yet capable of cleansing. In the documentary it is variably slick and glossy, or choppy as if painted by a pallet knife. An Italian sea urchin diver transforms from a portly man making his hesitant way across the rocks to a sleek seal-like shape underwater. The doctor tells the camera that the men pulled from the boats often have extensive chemical burns from the fuel that mixes with seawater in the bottom of the boat, soaking their clothes and skin. Those who go to sea do not come back the same, as one migrant sings/speaks: “The sea is not a place to pass by… the sea is not a road.” As the poet Warsan Shire writes: “you have to understand, / that no one puts their children in a boat / unless the water is safer than the land.”

The refugees are arriving into a Europe grossly divided by its ethical responsibilities towards the people arriving on its shores. The tenderness of a scene where the doctor performs an ultrasound on a woman pregnant with twins, showing her the tiny craniums adrift in the greyscale onscreen, cuts to one in which Samuele and his friend practise firing their catapults at cactuses into which they have hacked faces: a suggestion of the violence that might await the migrants, that shapes the world the twin babies are born to. The film is a depiction of how care is administered from person to person, in the words of the doctor: “it’s the duty of every human being, if you’re human, to help these people.” Yet the film’s closing moments are of Samuele, sitting on a dock that surges in an unsettled sea, pretending to shoot planes from the sky: what violence, it asks, might be incubated in human suffering, at the outer edges of a continent, where the rest of Europe refuses to look?