Audience Member
Moody and difficult iteration of the ages-old immigrant story, this time from Algeria to Italy. An intelligent discussion of racism and the need of the empowered to look down on others. Grim and dismal, minimally informative, but the acting is good and it's a cinema-travel-experience endeavor that is reasonably worthwhile.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/07/23
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Audience Member
I knew nothing about this film when I sat down to watch this film. I took to it fast. The hand-held camera takes some getting used to, and there were times when the action was unclear due to a lack of light. The style was appropriate for the most part, however, suiting the subject and setting. The main characters are sympathetic and their stories comprehensible from the start. The brothers Ayiva and Abas we travel with from a few minutes into the film, are believably differentiated throughout. I personally understood Ayiva, whose POV the film takes, and who seemed to take a rope-a-dope stance to anything the world could throw at him, but could understand why his brother might look down on him for it.
The film is gentle. Never preachy. The acting is natural. I have come across references to the main characters having been played by non-actors, with Ayiva played by a refugee whose story resembles his character's. True or not, it feels real enough. For most of the film, the story of the refugees life here stands in relation to many other similarly-themed films as Jarhead stands to other war films: though there is action, it's low key, with much of it relating to work, to getting hands on a bargain, Skypeing home, the rituals of food. In the last third of the film, this changes somewhat, but if the pace steps up, it is never long frenetic.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/02/23
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Audience Member
cinegeek.de Es gibt diese Theorie, dass es in der Geschichte der Menschheit nur eine Handvoll Fabeln gibt, die immer wieder variiert werden. Mediterranea ist die Geschichte zweier Freunde aus Burkina Faso, die sich nach Italien durchschlagen und dort als Hilfsarbeiter Geld verdienen. Es ist die Geschichte einer modernen Odyssee. Ayiva (Koudous Seihon), lässt seine Tochter zurück, um mit seinem Freund Abas (Alassane Sy) zu fliehen. Wir erleben die Überfahrt auf LKWs und zu Fuss durch die Wüste. Schliesslich überqueren sie das Mittelmeer auf einem Motorboot ohne Steuermann. Sie landen in einem italienischen Auffanglager. Ohne Papiere und feste Arbeit - womöglich mit drohender Abschiebung... Wir haben diese Geschichte schon gesehen - etwas ist aber grundlegend anders: Jonas Carpignano konfrontiert uns mit zwei Charakteren, die handeln und ihr Schicksal selbst in der Hand haben. Dadurch lässt er uns nicht in Betroffenheits-Voyeurismus verfallen. Vielleicht handeln sie sogar falsch? Das Geschehen wird mit einer Handkamera dokumentarisch festgehalten. Fast steht der Film in der Tradition des Neo Realismus. Mediterranea entwickelt eine rauhe Poesie und ist deshalb umso ergreifender, weil er nicht um jeden Preis eine Wirkung erzielen will. mehr auf cinegeek.de
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/31/23
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Audience Member
Carpignano's debut is sensitive to tackle this delicate subject matter with the objectivity that it deserves, offering a realistic look at the difficult life of African migrants in Europe and achieving an honest note of sadness in the end without any need of sentimentality to move us.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/14/23
Full Review
Audience Member
MEDITERRANEA written and directed by Jonas Carpignano who has been working on this film for 5 years. Initially in 2010, he intended the project to be a short documentary on the African immigrants who were mainly farm workers in the town of Rosarno in Calbria, Italy protesting against their discriminatory treatment and horrific squalid living conditions.
"... several thousand immigrants live in and around Rosarno while helping with the harvest of oranges and clementines...On the Gioia Tauro plain which encompasses Rosarno, they are collected each morning by overseers and driven into citrus groves for work that can last from dawn to dusk..."They earn 25 a day", said Father Ennio Stamile of the Roman Catholic charity Caritas. 'They have to send money to their countries to maintain their families and also live here. Not much is left for them. The economic crisis has exacerbated their situation...On the plain, there are about 2,000 African immigrants who sleep the night crowded together in a former paper mill and another large building, said Monsignor Pino de Masi, the vicar-general of the Oppido-Palmi diocese. 'If anyone from central government were to see the conditions in which they live, without sanitation, electricity, water or heating, they would not be surprised by what has happened.' "
(The Guardian, John Hooper 1/2/2010)
Nights of violence between the migrants and the Italian locals led to many injuries and during the day demonstrators - marched on Town Hall to demand an end to racial intolerance. Into this highly-charged milieu, the Director Carpignano met an Aftrican migrant, Koudous Seihon from Burkina Faso whose powerful presence changed the trajectory of his original concept - from a short documentary to a full-length feature film based on the life and stories told to him by Seihon who also agreed to play the lead character, Ayiva - a beautiful, nuanced performance conveying steadiness of character with a deep longing for his homeland and the seven year old daughter he left behind, combined with an optimistic view of a future that is fraught with barriers based on color, and economic bleakness.
MEDITERRANEA follows the well worn path to "the promised land" which unknowingly is often seeded with hopelessness and despair. In this fictional dramatization of Koudous Seihon's own trek, Ayiva must first obtain the money to leave Burkina Faso and is forced to pay unscrupulous brokers high fees to get a seat on a truck filled with fellow travelers - herded together like lambs going to slaughter.
I am an artist whose focus has been on refugees and migrants for the past 14 years and the images on the screen reflected my paintings like a mirror - literally pictures moving. I wanted to cry out "hold that frame, and the next one, and the one after, etc. etc!!!!" Once on their journey to Europe the exhausted bands of wanderers have to go through many difficult and life threatening trials - all on foot - over Algiers; stumbling through the dry vast seemingly limitless Libyan desert, where bandits/ human vultures prey on the vulnerable; and the final "labor" - maneuvering a small boat without a seasoned navigator through the volatile waters of the Mediterranean Sea exposed to nature's moods - be they light-filled or threatening storms - until those that endure arrive in Calabria - the toe of Italy where the local welcome is wary and impassive and often downright aggressive and dangerous.
Wyatt Garfield's cinematography is immediate and intimate. The hand-held camera bounces along with the fleeing characters contributing to the chaotic climate and the confusion of flight - we don't know where we are; there are moments when the lens is in and out of focus, an arm, a leg an eye bounces on the screen, distance is compressed - near and far become a blur, and we in the audience experience the tension and agitation of the approaching unknown.
We follow Ayiva and his best friend Abas (Alassane Sy), a languid, narcissistic, spoiled man envisioning Europe as a huge Hollywood fantasy with a dream of sexy women responding to his "handsome charms" - who smashes up against reality filling him with anguish at the fetid and wretched circumstances he and his friend are forced to occupy, falling into depression and despondency, eventually striking back in frenzied frustration.
MEDITERRANEA is not delusional cinema - it is a heard-hitting view of displacement, contrasting cultures with moments of shared humanity. The flight from the homeland - is a painfully difficult one which requires a steeliness of will and some humor. That humor is injected by a teenaged Italian boy Pio (Pio Amato), a consummate tradesman who barters with the African immigrants and is dead-panned comic in the process. In contrast the immigrant women are often exploited by the Italian men, and we catch a glimpse of how they are sexually abused - barely witnessed by the camera, silhouettes in the act of fellatio behind a dim, closing door.
The film climaxes with the immigrants' fierce uprising on the streets of the city after the destruction and collapse of their tawdry makeshift "homes" - demolished by the Italian Police - Carabinieri. The locales in the community are brutal in their response - a retelling of the original Rosarno outbreak, where Director Jonas Carpignano first met Seihon (Ayiva) who would galvanize this movie; an attempt to narrate crossing borders without any simple answers to what we see daily in the "headlines".
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/13/23
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Audience Member
It's a remarkable film and a must-see.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/12/23
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