Terraferma

Linosa, a tiny volcanic island south of Sicily. The fishing is dying, and the island is learning to live off summer tourists instead. Filippo, twenty, lives with his widowed mother Giulietta, who wants to rent their house to visitors from the mainland, and his grandfather Ernesto, an old fisherman who still lives by the law of the sea: you never leave anyone in the water. One day, out on the boat, they pull a group of African migrants from the waves. The law says they should have reported them. Instead, they hide a pregnant woman and her little boy at home.

Emanuele Crialese, who made Respiro and The Golden Door, has always filmed islands and migration, and here he brings the two together in the most direct way. The contrast is the whole film: on one side, tourists dancing on boats and posing for photos; on the other, exhausted people clinging to the same boats in the dark. The night sequence in the water is one of the most powerful scenes in modern Italian cinema, and impossible to forget.

It is not subtle, and sometimes the symbolism is spelled out a little too clearly. But it is made with real anger and real tenderness, and the question it asks, what do you owe a stranger who is drowning, has only become more urgent since. It won the Special Jury Prize at Venice and was Italy's Oscar entry. Beautiful, humane, and painfully relevant.