Northwest Film Forum

Gianfranco Rosi turns his lens on his own country, roaming and filming for over two years in a minivan on Rome’s giant ring road—the Grande Raccordo Anulare, or GRA—to discover the invisible worlds and possible futures harbored in this area of constant turmoil. Elusive characters and fleeting apparitions emerge from the background of the winding zone: a nobleman from the Piemonte region and his college student daughter sharing a one-room efficiency in a modern apartment building along. These vignettes coalesce and reveal a modern tapestry of the urban pastoral. The result is a beguiling, utterly uncliched love letter to Rome itself.

“I wanted the audience to get lost in that meta space, the psychogeography of the space. The Romans themselves don't know where the film was shot. The idea was to open the circle and make it like an infinite line. Almost like a mental space.”

Click here to listen to Pure Nonfiction’s interview with Rosi about the making of Fire at Sea, his student days at NYU, and his friendship with writer Charles Bowden.