Vita d'a_Mare
“The fishermen have faces furrowed by wrinkles that look like smiles, and whatever you confide in them, the sea has already told them.” Fabrizio De André's line is the epigraph to Vita d'a_Mare — “Life of the Sea” — Carmelo Stompo's black-and-white document of the men who work the fishing boats off the Sicilian coast. Shot mostly at night and dawn, in the hard light of deck lamps, the series follows the work itself: nets coiled and mended by hand, ropes looped on deck, a boat crossing dark water toward the horizon, the catch spilling silver under a bare bulb. Between the labour there are quieter frames — a fisherman asleep in a narrow bunk, another lit only by a cigarette's coal. Stompo shows the crew as a small floating community bound by repetition and risk, night after night.
