23 000 Lives

A group of young Berliners — nonprofessionals, driven rather than trained — crowdfund a decommissioned vessel and sail it into the Mediterranean to pull refugees from the sea. Markus Goller builds the film as an activist procedural: less interested in the voyages themselves than in the legal and institutional friction that accumulates around them, as the crew's improvised mission collides with maritime law, European politics, and their own conflicting ideas about what doing the right thing actually permits. Louis Hofmann and Mala Emde lead a cast working in a register that stays close to the documentary texture of the events the film draws from.