Review – The Human Cargo
You wouldn’t have wanted to be in Albania in 1991. Fifty years of corrupt, totalitarian rule had produced staggering unemployment and poverty, and the recent collapse of the Berlin Wall amped up the feeling of freedom well deserved and fiercely imminent. You wouldn’t have wanted to be in Albania in the 90s, and neither did the Albanians.
So when a ship arrived in port with 10,000 tons of sugar, word got around and, as soon as that sweet cargo was unloaded, half the population of the port city of Durazzo decided to run away from home. What happens next makes for some of the most astounding archive footage you’ll ever see. By the end of the day thousands of ordinary citizens have dropped tools, partners and familial links to cling to every square inch of that freighter of freedom, hoping the captain will take please them all to Italy.
The Human Cargo is Ruddock’s/Abbot’s/Shorten’s worst nightmare – a shitload of trouble in the heaving form of a boatload of (gulp!) immigrants, a massive structure creaking and teeming with desperate people temporarily out of their minds. No food, no water, no plan, no port that will take them, these economic refugees are living the dream for a day and, as detailed in many recent interviews, starting to doubt their wisdom before they’ve even left Albanian waters.
Eventually, the Italian port of Bari takes the ship in. What happens there, what you actually do with 20,000 unexpected and unwelcome arrivals, makes Australia look gracious and creates a great second half of the doco. Here the director, Daniele Vicari, gets into his stride as we follow the next few awful days in the eyes of news gatherers and the voices of the participants.
There’s a disarming ‘what were we thinking?’ nature to some of that interview footage, crisp and HD as it is against the grainy and immediate, unfiltered news footage of the time. But it is the latter, the incredible archive stuff spun towards us with a wild metal soundtrack at times, that is the real core of this work. Daniele explains in his director’s statement how sheer collective astonishment at the exceptional event allowed for photographers and filmmakers to document everything freely.
They certainly did. The results are amazing – the poor stricken vessel resembling an over-coloured ant colony at times, an island literally composed of humankind. The scenes of desperate Albanians climbing up ropes like rats, or diving in Italian port water to escape repatriation, the chaos in their temporary home Bari stadium, the camaraderie and the blunt authority – it’s all there as a massive harbinger of what was to come for us all. Where has this stuff been?
The original title of this marvellous documentary – The Sweet Ship (Le Nave Dolce) – says it all: a temptation, a rush, the awful let-down when the sugar hit wears off. The Human Cargo as a title is a little more blunt but, none the less, traces that curve of freedom and responsibility, of impulse and consequence, in a masterful way.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDqIEs1dAy4&w=400]
