“Fire at Sea,” Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary about the ongoing European migrant crisis, has been progressively gaining critical and widespread appeal since its debut at the Berlin Film Festival this February, where it was unanimously awarded the festival’s top prize, the Golden Bear.
Beloved actress Meryl Streep, who served as the jury president of the festival, hosted a special screening of Rosi’s documentary at The Metrograph in New York earlier this week, where she also spoke about the film beforehand. Turns out, she still an ardent fan of the award winner.
READ MORE: Berlin Review: Gianfranco Rosi’s Golden Bear-Winning Documentary ‘Fire At Sea’
“Yes, it’s a documentary, I guess. But it’s also art,” said Streep. “The way the truth is arranged makes it sort of like a poem. And I don’t mean like a twee kind of poem, I mean something really essential. It’s unavoidable.”
“Fire at Sea” screened at the Telluride, Toronto and New York Film Festivals earlier this year, and was nominated for the Best Documentary prize at the European Film Awards, the Critics Choice Documentary Awards and the IDA Documentary Awards.
The film has also been submitted for Best Documentary Feature and as Italy’s selection for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2017 Academy Awards.
Check out Streep’s introduction below, exclusively available on IndieWire.
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