11/04/2025 - Jean-François Ravagnan looks back on the tragic media image of a young Gambian drowning in Venice to seek out his roots and to give him a name

Jean-François Ravagnan presented his first documentary feature, The Last Shore, in a world premiere within the Visions du Réel Festival’s Highlights section. Whilst he also has a short fiction film under his belt by the name of Renaître, which was released in 2015, Jean-François Ravagnan is primarily known for his work as an assistant director on films such as In Syria [+see also:
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trailer
interview: Philippe Van Leeuw
film profile], Playground [+see also:
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interview: Laura Wandel
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interview: François Pirot
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The Last Shore opens with shocking footage which was shot hastily by a Venetian tourist in January 2017, in which we see a young Gambian man drowning in the Grand Canal before the eyes of a hundred or so tourists, while racist insults drown out calls for help and, most shockingly, no-one moves a muscle. Faced with the spectacular nature of this footage, the approach adopted by the media towards this scandal, and the anger felt vis-a-vis these spectators’ senseless passivity, which might result in astonishment first and then indignation, the filmmaker takes the path of complexity, lending a voice to those who knew the boy in the Canal whose name was Pateh. As we listen to their intersecting accounts, we understand that this young man’s story is both a universal tale of exile and the singular story of a man devastated by loneliness and homesickness.

There are no filmed interviews in this movie, the approach taken is personal, and the preferred medium of people’s voices heightens the intimacy of the tale, helping not only to de-anonymise Pateh, but also to shine a light on the scale, complexity and singularity of his journey. Annihilated by grief, his mother speaks for herself but also for the village women more generally, who are all mourning their departed sons. His father and brother speak of the pain of their loss but also their guilt at allowing a soul so dear to them to bear the full weight of his departure and its risks. Scenes from daily life file past on screen, with or without his loved ones, in Gambia as well as in Malta where Pateh once tried to start a new life for himself.

We also come to understand that despite Pateh surviving the many dangers inherent to migratory journeys, the time spent waiting in Libya, the Mediterranean crossing, the camps in Italy and the steps taken to obtain documents, his ordeal was far from over. By individualising the path Pateh took, marked by the lethal melancholy of exile which left him on first-name terms with madness, The Last Shore lends depth to any reflection on how we welcome migrant workers, and notably how we care for them psychologically. The apparent gentle nature of the footage and pace, together with the film’s poetic form, contrasts with its opening frames and helps, first and foremost, to lend depth to the anger, but also to individualise the grief in question, to make it less generic in order to better understand its impact. 

The Last Shore was produced by Dérives (Belgium) in co-production with Michigan Films (Belgium), Wallonie Image Production, Sténopé (Belgium) and Les Films d’ici (France).

(Translated from French)