Footage of the sea and audio recordings of a conversation in which a sinking refugee ship urgently asks for help from the coast guard, and is met by bureaucratic red tape in response .... until the final silence.

Otranto, Torre del Serpente, the easternmost part of Italy, the point where, lest we forget, East and West once touched. Today, the memory of that link seems to re-emerge as a consequence of all the illegal immigrants that disembark on its beaches, as their clothes, shoes and personal effects found along the coast remind us. To those among them that did not make it, we dedicate the canto of the polyphonic Albanian chorus of Lapardha that, on August 5, 2002, at dawn, sang one of its passage for the victims of the 1997 “accident”, in which dozens of Albanians died aboard a boat sunk by the Italian navy.