Sea Sorrow

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Movie
German title Sea Sorrow
Original title Sea Sorrow
Country of production United Kingdom
original language English
Publishing year 2017
length 72 minutes
Rod
Director Vanessa Redgrave
script Vanessa Redgrave
production Carlo Gabriel Nero
camera Andrew Dearden
cut Folasade Oyeleye
occupation

Sea Sorrow ( English for suffering at sea ) is the directorial debut of the English actress Vanessa Redgrave . In the film essay , she interweaves her own escape story as a child in World War II with the situation of refugees today.

The film, produced by her son Carlo Nero , premiered in Cannes in 2017 as part of the Special Screenings series. It is distributed by the British Council . The film opened the International Nuremberg Film Festival of Human Rights 2017.

content

Sea Sorrow is a cinematic collage about aspects of the refugee crisis in Europe . The trigger for the film was a visit by Vanessa Redgrave, who has been committed to upholding human rights for years, in the so-called jungle of Calais . She was shocked by the dire situation of the migrant children. Vanessa Redgrave herself was evacuated from London to Herefordshire in 1940 when she was three years old because of the bombing raids on cities in England during World War II . In the memory of her own childhood and moved by the conversations with migrants in Calais, she wrote her script for the film. A series of family photos of the Redgraves serve as picture documents for the own story. The film is supplemented by interviews with Peter Sutherland , an advisor to the UN Secretary-General on refugee issues, the human rights activist Lizz Clegg and the Labor politician Alfred Dubs , who, after tough efforts, succeeded in getting an amendment to the 2016 Immigration Act in the English Parliament in 2016 was accepted by the House of Commons in the second round . The amendment affects the admission of unaccompanied refugee children in Great Britain.

In another section of the film, Emma Thompson reads from historical English newspaper articles dealing with the immigration of Jews to Great Britain during the Holocaust . These texts differ only insignificantly in the argumentation, tendency and rhetoric of articles about the migration problem in the current English press.

The title Sea Sorrow is a quote from Shakespeare's play The Tempest . Scene 2 from Act I of the film adaptation with Ralph Fiennes as Prospero and Daisy Bevan , a granddaughter of Vanessa Redgrave, in the role of Miranda is recorded in the film . Prospero describes to his daughter how they took a boat after their expulsion, a lazy skeleton from the boat, completely un rigged / No mast nor sails, even the rats had it / For fear: they unload us / To weep in the roar of the sea [...]

reception

In the title Sea Sorrow, Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian hears a weak echo of Gianfranco Rosi's multi-award-winning documentary Sea Fire ( Fuocoammare ) , which addresses the fate of refugees on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa . Sea Fire is the reference film by which many critics measured Redgrave's film.

Except for the slap by the critic of the Evening Standard , who described the film as an “amateur polemic” about the refugee crisis and would prefer to relegate it to the Redgraves family archive, Sea Sorrow received an overall positive response. In general, typical beginners' mistakes, such as a lack of mastery of the technique and a poorly organized script, were criticized. The director's commitment, seriousness and clear language were praised.

David Ehrlich writes about the film in IndieWire : “Redgrave's film is as straightforward as Rosi's film is impressionistic, her plea as disordered as his elegant. […] Vanessa Redgrave brings a seriousness to this kind of thing: When she talks about the stranded children who are denied the value of their own lives, one can hardly imagine that even Theresa May is not affected by the moral clarity of her demands ".

Guy Lodge from Variety calls the film a “sincere, sometimes impressionistic and formally naive cri de coeur (French for“ outcry of the heart ”) [...] an appeal to citizens and politicians to open hearts, minds and borders for those who come from the War in Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere are affected. "In terms of artistic value and cinematic perfection, he was not a direct hit (" doesn't score heavily "), but Redgrave had dealt with a topic of overwhelming relevance before the other, More smoothly accomplished directors shied away.

The film gives the refugees plenty of time to speak, said Thomas Sotinel from Le Monde . Their extraordinary and heartbreaking stories showed that what connects a rich English woman and a teenage girl from Guinea is stronger than what separates them.

Web links

Notes and individual references

  1. ^ British Council - British Films Directory , accessed August 29, 2017
  2. ↑ Vanessa Redgrave comes to Nuremberg , BR24, July 24, 2017 ( Memento from September 28, 2017 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Alexandra Sims: Immigration Bill: MPs vote against child refugee amendment in: The Independent April 25, 2016, accessed March 12, 2017
  4. ↑ Now I arise / sit still and hear the last of our sea-sorrow , William Shakespeare: The Tempest , Act I, scene 2, line 170
  5. ^ Translated from August Wilhelm Schlegel. Berlin 1843/44
  6. ↑ Peter Bradshaw: Sea Sorrow review - Vanessa Redgrave's ungainly, heartfelt essay on the refugee crisis , in: The Guardian , May 27, 2017, accessed August 24, 2017
  7. ↑ David Saxton: Cannes 2017: Sea Sorrow, film review - A terrible tale told badly in: Evening Standard, accessed August 29, 2017
  8. ↑ David Ehrlich: 'Sea Sorrow' Review: Vanessa Redgrave's Directorial Debut Is a Plain But Passionate Call to End the Refugee Crisis - Cannes 2017 in: IndieWire, May 17, 2017, accessed on August 24, 2017
  9. ↑ Guy Lodge: Cannes Film Review: 'Sea Sorrow' in: Variety, May 17, 2017, accessed August 29, 2017
  10. ↑ Thomas Sotinel: Cannes 2017 avec "Sea Sorrow", Vanessa Redgrave met sa célébrité au service des réfugiés , Le Monde, May 18, 2017