Morgan Knibbe, Those Who Feel the Fire Burning, 2014. All rights reserved.It is said that drowning is one of the most painful ways to die. The involuntary survival instinct to breathe takes over any rational knowledge that your body has succumbed to the weight of the water. At which point, your lungs just burst. Your brain is supposed to associate the pain with that of burning.
This experience of powerlessness, of mind over body, of man over nature, was shared by over 1,800 people in the first six months of 2015, as they tried to cross the Mediterranean sea into Europe. When Morgan Knibbe began filming his ambitious boundary-blurring film, Those Who Feel The Fire Burning, migrant deaths were five times less and the Mediterranean sea had not become the news sensation and major headline it is today.
But it’s not about the numbers, Morgan Knibbe tells us, in this experimental, cinéma du corps film, which features a (literally) floating protagonist, a deconstructive and cyclical narrative, and a troubling existential discussion of the boundaries between life and death. Because, as we are all made aware now, some have neither the power to choose how they are forced to live, nor how they are forced to die. We are aware of this the same way we are aware of the vast watery cemetery that our ocean has become.
