Documentary Film #387

A hoodie, pants, a belt… That’s what little is left of “number 387”, one of the 800 migrants who perished on April 18, 2015, off the Libyan coast. On the military base in Melilli, Sicily, Cristina Cattaneo, the best forensic pathologist in Italy, leads the largest identification operation ever undertaken to date on the Mediterranean.
From an examination of bones, 3D reconstruction and cross-checking DNA - Cristina and her Labanof team in Milan will do everything possible to find the “treasure of identity”.
To find it, they need to find the families, all across the planet.
This is why Cristina work with a special forensic team from the ICRC, namely Jose Pablo Baraybar, a Peruvian anthropologist recently hired by the ICRC to design a global strategy for the identification of migrants throughout the Mediterranean region.
On the field, in the smallest villages of West Africa, the Red Cross volunteers are meeting the families who lost someone and collecting every possible ante mortem information to send it back to the forensic pathologists.
In the coming months, each of them will make every possible effort to restore a name to each shipwrecked numbers.
These characters, forming a star, gradually converge into the matrix of the search for identity, drawing us into a philosophical thriller.
What makes a man a man? Who are they? Who are we? Who will we be together?