The HBO documentary It Will Be Chaos goes inside the Italian island that is on the frontline of an international problem

On the arid Italian island of Lampedusa, known as the “door of Europe”, 400,000 migrants have arrived by way of the Mediterranean sea in just the past two decades. With a population of 6,000 and an economy that runs on fishing and tourism, it’s emerged as an unlikely port in the storm of Europe’s immigration crisis, welcoming asylum seekers from Syria, Libya, Eritrea, the Gambia, the Maghreb, Sudan and Tunisia, whose coast is just 70 miles away.

What is the current state of the migration crisis in Europe? Read more

Lampedusa, though, is not only a site of salvation. It’s also where families claim the remains of their loved ones, whose bodies are often retrieved in the cast nets of local fisherman. It’s here where the new HBO documentary It Will Be Chaos begins, at the southernmost tip of Italy, as locals and migrants alike await the corpses of the more than 350 refugees who died in the infamous 2013 shipwreck off the coast.

In the opening scenes, industrial-sized cranes lift caskets holding the mostly Somali and Eritrean immigrants who died at sea, while a local tells their families the island isn’t big enough, or sufficiently resourced, to keep the caskets there. Harrowing and timely, given Donald Trump’s own draconian posture toward immigrants, it’s one of the more disturbing depictions yet of a crisis that’s placed strain on both refugees and the locals receiving them.

“The main goal we had was to give this big picture of the crisis, which is really a tale of two crises,” says Lorena Luciano, one half of the Italian film-making couple that produced, directed and shot the documentary.

Adds her husband and collaborator, Filippo Piscopo: “When we started witnessing the crisis from here, as Italian residents in the US, we decided to fly to Lampedusa to meet with the main players: the refugees, the fisherman, the locals, the humanitarian organizations on site. And we realized that this crisis was way more complex than we thought and than the media was portraying it.”

Luciano and Piscopo had been finishing up a documentary called Coal Rush, about water contamination in an Appalachian community in West Virginia, when they decided to document the scene in Lampedusa, whose former mayor Giusi Nicolini won the Unesco peace prize last year for her “boundless humanity and unwavering commitment to refugee crisis management”.

In one of the documentary’s best moments, the mayor corrects a gaggle of reporters referring to migrants as illegals. “Let’s make it clear,” she says in Italian. “Those who land in Lampedusa aren’t illegals. They are refugees.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People in the water after a wooden boat, carrying more than 500, capsized off Lampedusa, Italy. Photograph: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Both Luciano and Piscopo hail from northern Italy but spent many summers in the south, where their parents were born. “It strikes you in a different way when you relocate and see your country with completely different eyes,” says Luciano. “We left Italy when it was completely white, under one religion, everyone speaking Italian. So we felt the urge to tell this story and try to understand what happens next.”

After receiving a development grant the couple spent a year in Lampedusa, where they befriended refugees, fishermen, doctors, politicians and members of the Italian coast guard. During this time they sought to correct some of the misconceptions people had about the refugee crisis, during which Europe has seen its largest influx of immigrants, about 1.8m in total, since the second world war.

“There was this idea that the island was completely invaded, and I use this word on purpose, by migrants, and that the locals were powerless,” Luciano explains. “But actually, the locals were some of the main players who have been experiencing this since before the Arab Spring. These are the fisherman who catch the bodies, locals who divide the resources, who bring water and blankets, who try to help mothers with young children.”

Nicolini, meanwhile, got little support from the government on the mainland, where anti-immigrant sentiment, endorsed by the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and the newly elected far-right coalition, is pervasive. “She wasn’t backed at all by the Italian government,” says Piscopo. “The prime minister would show up for half an hour on a runway in Lampedusa and then leave, leaving the island in the same situation in which they found it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Giusi Nicolini, the former mayor of Lampedusa, receives an award. Photograph: Jacek Bednarczyk/EPA

As they spent time with refugees and Lampedusani, Luciano and Piscopo decided to focus on two subjects: a migrant named Aregai, whose three cousins died in the 2013 shipwreck, and the Orfahlis, a Syrian family they accompanied on the high-risk pilgrimage across the Balkan corridor, through nine different countries, toward Germany, where they successfully applied for asylum. “We traveled with them in refugee trains, set up in refugee camps, we walked for miles and miles with them during the day and overnight,” remembers Piscopo. “On the production level it was challenging, because we couldn’t stop to charge our equipment and we didn’t have time to stop and download the footage we were filming.”

Another challenge, Luciano explains, was the emotional and ethical burden of bearing witness to the roadblocks facing hordes of migrants but focusing primarily on just a few of them. “It was a million refugees on the move, babies, pregnant women, handicapped people, and there is a temptation to open up and show more,” she says. “But along the Balkan ride Filippo and I understood the story we wanted to tell was the microcosm, the dynamics of a small family going with four kids from destination to destination without breaking.”

Among the misconceptions the documentary goes a long way toward correcting is the idea that migrants journeying towards Europe have it easy once they’ve fled the often war-torn or impoverished countries from whence they came. The opposite, in fact, is true, as the Orfahlis, with four small children in tow, are shown navigating Greece, Macedonia, Croatia and Serbia without enough money for a taxi to the border, winter clothes, or a snack at the corner store.

“Often these parents are judged for putting their kids through this harrowing process, but they don’t have any other choice!” Luciano says. “The most common line we heard was that they stay where they are until, one day, a bomb hits the building next door and the neighbor dies, or their cousin dies, and that’s usually when they are quick to sell everything and embark on a journey.”

After the 2013 shipwreck, the Italian government implemented a program called Mare Nostrum, an elaborate and costly maritime search-and-rescue operation that, in just a year, rescued 160,000 refugees at sea. It was replaced afterwards by Triton, a less expensive border security mission conducted by the European Union. Since the end of Mare Nostrum, the number of migrant rescues has nosedived since reaching its 2014 peak while deaths increased every year since. Just last week the new Italian government, a populist, far-right coalition emerging from the hung parliament in the March 2018 elections, rejected a rescue boat carrying 629 migrants slated to dock in Palermo. Lampedusani, too, seem to have had a change of heart: in the 2017 mayoral elections Nicolini came in third, losing to Salvatore Martello, who said on the campaign trail that he “cannot stand seeing migrants swarming everywhere”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fishermen lay a wreath in memory of victims of a immigrants disaster over the Lampedusa shore. Photograph: Tullio M Puglia/Getty Images

For Luciano and Piscopo, who describe themselves as “very Italian” both on-set and at home, watching their native country regress toward nationalist, anti-immigrant politics while the Trump administration separates children from their mothers at the US-Mexican border has a through-the-looking-glass effect. “It’s frustrating for us because we witnessed Berlusconi going into power, and then we saw Trump with the same populist America-first narrative,” says Piscopo.

“The parallels between the Trump administration and the new populist coalition stemming from Berlusconi’s propaganda,” explains Luciano, “is the way that they are able to take numbers to create this idea of a tsunami of refugees. But the numbers are actually smaller and would be more manageable if a real migration policy were put in place, if they’d rethink global mobility.”

“It’s not different,” adds her husband. “In the Sonoran desert people die of dehydration, and in the Mediterranean people drown.”