Io Capitano

Io capitano

Venice Film Festival

VERDICT: Director Matteo Garrone steps back from the edginess of stylized crime dramas and horror fantasies to recount the no less cruel and shocking journey made by two Senegalese teens to Europe in 'Io Capitano'.

Films about refugees and immigrants have become a sadly prolific subgenre of world cinema in these last decades of mass migration due to wars, terrorism and endemic poverty. How can the horrors faced by Africans who choose to make the journey to Europe be told on film, after the surfeit of news reporting that has, if anything, dulled the audience’s natural emotional response to fellow human beings in mortal peril?

In Io Capitano (a.k.a. Me Captain)), acclaimed Italian director Matteo Garrone returns to his roots to dramatize the most classic of adventure stories – two friends who embark on a terrifying odyssey from Dakar to Sicily – in a sort of coming-of-age tale seen through their eyes. Their motivation might be judged flimsy by some: they are aspiring young musicians who dream of becoming stars and signing autographs in Europe, and they are willing to leave the families they love to follow an illusion. But the sincerity of the two main characters, Seydou (played by the innocent-faced, open-hearted Seydou Sarr) and his marginally more practical cousin Moussa (Moustapha Fall), soon creates a bond of empathy with the audience, making their ordeal very hard to watch indeed.

It is one of the first fiction films to visualize how people cross the Sahara desert on foot and the dangers they face at the hands of unscrupulous human traffickers and armed militia groups, who extract money through graphically depicted torture scenes in ancient “detention centers” in the Libyan desert. Premiering in Venice, this is certainly one of the most impactful Italian films in competition, where a prize would help the Italian-Belgian-French co-prod to find general audiences after the festival hubbub is over.

The immigration theme recalls the first films that Garrone made as a director in the 1990’s, Land in Between and Guests, about immigrants from various countries living in Italy. Here the story begins by drawing a picture of life in Dakar, Senegal that is full of life, music, dancing and closely knit families. Large families live squeezed into two rooms, but their is a joy in the air that makes Europe look sour and cold in comparison.

The 16-year-old Seydou and his buddy Moussa have a secret: they have been working as laborers to save enough cash to go to Europe and make their fortunes as music performers. Ignoring his mother’s veto, Seydou jumps on a bus with Moussa in the first joyful leg of their journey. On the dusty border between Mali and Niger, they buy rush-order passports at exorbitant prices and purchase a ride to Libya aboard an open pickup truck; it drives over endless sand dunes at breakneck speed, losing a passenger along the way. When they reach a one-palm-tree oasis, they are surprised to find the ride is over and a long march to Libya, on foot, lies ahead of them.

This is where the tale turns dark, even under a blazing African sun. They walk past decomposing corpses and when an older woman falls down, unable to walk any further, Seydou realizes there is nothing he can do to help her. Given the realism of the moment, a brief fantasy sequence (apparently taking place in Seydou’s head) comes across as jarring, even in the midst of D.P. Paolo Carnera’s seductive cinematography of golden dunes that would not have looked out of place in Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky.

Things take a much worse turn when trucks full of armed militia show up during the night and separate Seydou from Moussa. The latter is taken away to prison and Seydou ends up in the detention center’s torture chamber, in a repellent scene whose crudeness can only be justified in showing how inhumanly the sub-Saharan Africans are treated. How he gets out of the situation, by being sold into temporary slavery, comes off as a hard-to-believe stroke of luck, though it is hard to see what other narrator options were available. From there it is a fairly straight shot to the key scene of sailing to Italy aboard the traffickers’ boat, with a breath-taking twist that makes the sea journey much more powerful, offering an open-ended type of closure to Seydou’s story.

The high quality tech work gives the story it just dignity. Of particular note is how well Andrea Farri’s score integrates local African music sounds and songs, while Carnera’s photography is always very attentive to people and situations in the background of the action.

Director: Matteo Garrone
Screenplay: Matteo Garrone, Massimo Gaudioso, Massimo Ceccherini, Andrea Tagliaferri
Cast: Seydou Sarr, Moustapha Fall, Issaka Sawagodo, Hichem Yacoubi, Doodou Sagna, Khady Sy, Bamar Kane, Cheick Oumar Diaw
Producers: Paolo Del Brocco, Matteo Garrone
Cinematography: Paolo Carnera

Editing: Marco Spoletini
Productioin design: Dimitri Capuani
Costume design: Stefano Ciammitti
Music: Andrea Farri
Sound: Maricetta Lombardo, Mirko Perri, Daniela Bassani
Production companies: Archimede (Italy), Tarantula (Belgium) in association with Rai Cinema (Italy), Pathé Films (France)
Venue: Venice Film Festival (competition) World sales: Pathé FIlms
In Wolof, French
121 minutes