Dead Calm: Killing in the Med? review

This gut-punch documentary about the deaths of more than 500 asylum seekers – and the masked men rounding up refugees – makes a specific, horrific allegation. There should be severe consequences

We live in an age of overlapping crises, of too many red lines to count being crossed. A massacre here, an ecosystem breakdown there, shocking poverty close to home. Whenever news comes through of a boatload of desperate people drowning in the Mediterranean as they try to reach Europe from Africa, it barely registers – so it seems horribly likely that Dead Calm: Killing in the Med? will not be a landmark documentary. Especially during an election campaign in which the main parties are competing to be the toughest on repelling migrants, it probably won’t cause attitudes to change.

But it should. The film makes a specific, devastating allegation. It finds evidence that the Greek authorities – acting as a frontline border force on behalf of the EU, and the anti-migrant policies of its member governments – are not just neglectful towards asylum-seekers adrift at sea, but are actively, and forcefully, expelling some of those who make it across, outside the relevant due processes, returning them to the water and grave danger. It alternates between evidence of this practice and a reconstruction of the events of June 2023, when the fishing vessel Adriana set off from Libya carrying about 750 migrants, more than 500 of whom died when the boat sank in international waters off the Greek coast.