Strange Fish | Sea Rescue Day | A film evening with and for SOS Humanity
- When
- Where
- ACUD Kino, Berlin
- Presentation Features
- OmeU
The film's title, a reference to Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," draws a connection between the deaths of African migrants en route to Europe and the lynching of African Americans.As the camera in "Strange Fish" pans between images of the sea, fishing, and shipwrecks, the viewer learns how local fishermen are affected by this violence and how they respond, including by maintaining a migrant cemetery.
Giulia Bertoluzzi is a journalist and co-founder of Nawart Press, a collective of independent journalists. Her film Strange Fish, which won the EU Media Migration Award in 2017 and was released in September 2018, has won awards at several international festivals and was broadcast in cinemas and on television.In 2016/2017, she co-wrote and co-directed Far Right: A New Frightening Normal, a documentary about the rise of the far right in Europe, which was broadcast by Al Jazeera.In 2016, she was nominated for the Doc/IT Women Award at the Venice Film Festival for A Kurdish Women's Dream.
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Sea rescue as a life's work: How SOS Humanity saves lives | SOS Children's Villages WorldwideD 2025, 15'
SOS Humanity is a civilian sea rescue organization that has been rescuing refugees in distress at sea and bringing them to safety in the central Mediterranean since 2016.Together with partners such as SOS Children's Villages, the organization specifically supports particularly vulnerable children, young people, and women who have experienced traumatic experiences during their flight.In addition to rescue, SOS Humanity offers a safe and dignified environment on board the rescue ship Humanity 1, including medical care, psychosocial support, and special child- and women-friendly spaces.The goal is to offer rescued people protection, recovery, and stability, and to protect them from exploitation, violence, and abuse.
Plot: "Strange Fish" echoes Billie Holiday's song "Strange Fruit" in which, to general indifference, violence against colored people is taken as normal, with « black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees». In the South of the Mediterranean the feeling is the same. The fishermen in Zarzis, a Tunisian town on Libya's borders, set out every day wondering whether they will find a strange fish in their nets, the bloated corpse of a drowned migrant. But Strange Fish does not only show this drama, with its all-pervading indifference. It rather shows the deep and human response of the town's anonymous heroes. For 15 years, these fishermen have helped and saved thousands of people. “And if we find them already dead, we help them as well - we bury them,” says Chamseddine Marzoug.