15/10/2021 - Marcel Barrena’s film retraces the birth of the NGO Open Arms which has saved thousands of refugees, but is too enthusiastic in celebrating its protagonist
15/10/2021 - Marcel Barrena’s film retraces the birth of the NGO Open Arms which has saved thousands of refugees, but is too enthusiastic in celebrating its protagonist
15/10/2021 - Marcel Barrena’s film retraces the birth of the NGO Open Arms which has saved thousands of refugees, but is too enthusiastic in celebrating its protagonist
Anna Castillo, Sergi López and
Àlex Monner. The story takes us back to a voyage undertaken in 2015 by Óscar Camps and Gerard Canals, lifeguards on the Badalona coast, after seeing an image that sickened the world: the lifeless body of a young boy, washed up on a Mediterranean beach. Since that photograph was taken, hundreds of unsung heroes have saved the lives of more than 100,000 fellow humans, under the auspices of the NGO Open Arms.
Mediterráneo
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To prepare for the shoot, Barrena’s team undertook four years of painstaking documentation, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the coastguard and refugees themselves and making countless trips to Greece so as to be confident that the story would be told with absolute accuracy. The film retraces the journey of lifeguards Óscar (Fernández) and Gerard (Rovira) in the autumn of 2015. Bound for Lesbos, the pair have been shocked into action by the photograph of a dead chil