Purple Sea

22.-30.4. “I see everything,” she says, as if it were a curse. Brilliant sunshine, clear blue skies. The sea is calm. Buzzing voices. A peaceful moment if it weren’t for the fact that the sea is standing upright, vertical, like a waterfall. A rush of images, twirling, jolting. People in the boat, in the water, screams, life jackets, emergency whistles. There’s no horizon anymore, only deepness and nothing to hold on to. Playing to the drumbeat of this twirling chaos, a woman’s voice in the off speaks to him, to herself, to us, perhaps. During 67 minutes, we are the front-line witnesses of a humanitarian crisis. As helpless bystanders, we watch Amel Alzakout’s camera, bound to her wrist, capturing the images and sounds of the sinking boat transporting her and 316 other passengers across the Mediterranean Sea. Purple Sea forces us to confront the radical reality of the refugee’s crisis and leaves us stranded and suffocating. The film made its premiere at the Berlinale’s Forum expanded. In cooperation with the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.