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Although it has a resolutely local dimension, since it considers the daily life of the inhabitants of an island located in the south of Sicily, Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) was presented at its release in 2016 as a film aiming to mobilize political awareness at European level. It is indeed about Lampedusa and this documentary by Gianfranco Rosi has met with a great response. The island appears to be both a nerve center of migratory flows and at the same time an out-of-the-way place in the world. This article examines the formal choices, in particular the editing, through which the film exploits that contradiction to point out the effects of a certain form of border from the place it observes. Its aim is to highlight the ambivalent imaginary of insularity that the documentary mobilizes to do this, including by crossing its analysis with that of the fiction film Terraferma (Emanuele Crialese, 2011), which proposed a very different approach to the same territory.