As stated in the opening text of Gianfranco Rosi’s quietly devastating film “Fire at Sea,’’ the Italian island of Lampedusa lies in the Mediterranean 120 miles off the coast of Sicily and 70 miles from Africa. It is 20 square kilometers and around 6,000 people live here. In the past 20 years, 400,000 refugees have fled to the island on unseaworthy vessels from war and horror in the Middle East, Africa, and other places. From there, they hope, they can get to mainland Europe. Five thousand have died trying.

“Fire at Sea,’’ which screens Wednesday through Dec. 9 at the Museum of Fine Arts, does not follow up on the fates of those who survive, other than to show the Sicilian government’s compassionate but dehumanizing processing of them. They take them off their boats, remove the dead and sick and send the rest to detention camps. There, they group together, still drenched by the sea and corrosive diesel fuel, glowing gold from the metallic blankets they are issued.

One Nigerian refugee chants the story of his group’s travails, fleeing Nigeria’s wars to the Sahara where they died of thirst and bandits preyed on them, then to Libya where ISIS imprisoned them. But now, thank God, they have found refuge. His countrymen repeat phrases, a kind of chorus. It is like witnessing the birth of a horrifying epic poem.

None of this is witnessed by the inhabitants of Lampedusa. The migrant population is kept separate in holding facilities and the vessels are unloaded at sea. The lives of the local people are little affected by the sufferings and deaths of the desperate people just miles from their coast. It is a microcosm of the West today.

Rosi does not condemn or criticize the people of Lampedusa — he makes no editorial comment at all other than the subtle and ironic editing. The island population, at least, does not demonize the refugees as some other countries do.

Instead, there are kids like 9-year-old Samuele, who is deeply involved in carving slingshots from the island’s gnarly trees with his pal. He’s curious about his family’s past, and his mother tells him about her grandfather’s life as a fisherman during the war when the rockets of battling ships would light up the sky at night like “fire at sea.’’

“Fire at Sea’’ is also the title of an old song that a matronly woman requests on the local radio station. The DJ plays it, and then he turns to the news and a bulletin about a migrant ship capsizing nearby with hundreds of dead. The woman mutters “poor souls’’ and goes about her business.

So does Dr. Bartolo, the only physician on Lampedusa, whose job it is to provide care not just for the people who live on the island, but for the hundreds of dehydrated, starving, burned, beaten, diseased, and dying refugees arriving every week. He also must deal with those who don’t make it, and when he examines dead children and dead women who have given birth with their dead infants still attached by umbilical cords, his professional detachment is shaken. He shows pictures on his laptop, images of tiny boats crammed with ravaged passengers.

And Rosi’s camera gazes into hell itself. It examines the hold of a boat in which scores of dead bodies are entwined together like victims of Pompeii, covered with scattered, crushed and empty water bottles. Suddenly the fires at sea are no longer so far away.

For more information go to www .mfa.org/programs/series/fire-at-sea.

Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.