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.
Two survivors of the disaster take us through the calamity, step by step. Having previously been shown pictures of the boat that was to take them to Italy, they arrived at the meeting point on the Libyan coast to find a decrepit fishing rig that was far too small. Men wielding sticks and electrical cables forced them on to it, tossing the food and water that the refugees had brought overboard to fit more people on. By the fourth day of the journey, the passengers were so thirsty they were considering drinking the engine’s cooling fluid.
As that dreadful tale unspools, Dead Calm switches back to Greece, where rumours abound of masked men driving unmarked vans, rounding up refugees who have not yet made it to the relevant processing centre. It sounds unbelievable. But we see video shot from a distance by an intrepid journalist in which: a white van draws up; masked men get out; people including women and children are shunted along a jetty and on to a speedboat that transfers them to a coastguard boat.
Greece says investigations are continuing, but that any such incident is not part of any government policy. Dead Calm doesn’t provide a thick dossier of hard proof that the practice is systemic, but what it does turn up is easily enough for an inquiry to be a far-reaching one. Aside from the stunning sequence with the van and the speedboat, there is chilling testimony from a refugee who, in 2021, travelled from Cameroon to Turkey on land, then tried to make the short trip to Greece by boat. Upon arrival, he alleges, he and his companions were shot at, then forced on to a coastguard boat. In the previous case, the allegation is that the coastguard boat travelled out to sea, then dumped the refugees on a dinghy, letting them float towards Turkey; here, the man from Cameroon says he and his fellow travellers were simply thrown overboard, and that two men who later washed up dead on the Turkish coast were among those put in the water. It’s incredible, but the film claims to have collated allegations that 43 migrant deaths between 2020 and 2023 involved the Greek coastguard, with nine of those relating to people thrown into the sea.
Just when you think your mouth cannot fall open any wider, Dead Calm delivers two fascinating, infuriating interviews: with a senior representative of Frontex, the EU’s border agency, and with a former head of the Greek coastguard’s special forces unit. Neither conversation suggests a compassionate approach to the migration crisis, and the latter interview contains the most startling accidental hot-mic admission since The Jinx.
The film’s gut-punching last moments piece together how the Adriana sank, gathering evidence that it happened when a Greek patrol ship tried to tow it towards Turkey – Greece denies this – and that coastguard officers were indifferent to the sight of hundreds of people in the water. Why it took so long for the authorities to summon further help is unclear. What is unforgettable and undeniable is the horror described by the two survivors who are interviewed – both men fleeing the Syrian civil war – and by the captain of the passing luxury superyacht, which, in a last ironic twist, played a key role in the eventual rescue mission. Dead Calm ought to lead to severe consequences for someone – perhaps the most disturbing part of it is the almost certain knowledge that we live in a world where it won’t.
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