News from the future: In June’s European parliamentary elections, the anti-immigrant sentiment will (re)confirm the rise of right-wing extremists across the continent. Last fall, on the island of Lampedusa in Sicily, where most migrants arrive by sea to Europe, they outnumbered the locals (not coincidentally the setting for another award-winning film, Gianfranco Rossi’s Fuocoammare). This is not the place to debate how many immigrants and/or refugees Europe can accommodate, but one question remains: Who are these people? Which also makes the topic of the film selected as the Italian entry for the 96th Academy Awards, where it was further nominated for Best International Feature Film.

Signed by Matteo Garrone, Io capitano won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2023. Already a festival darling, Garrone has twice won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes: in 2008 for Gomorra and in 2012 for Reality.

Seydou and Moussa are two Senegalese teenagers who dream of the great adventure in the world of all possibilities: Europe, where they can get rich and become famous singers whom “white people ask for autographs”, the realm of the free world they see on social media and heard about from relatives who have managed to make a living there. Their life is poor and cramped, but not unhappy. Seydou, the film’s focal point, has a beautiful family, a house full of joy and song. The opening scenes are bright and culminate in a community celebration in the neighbourhood streets, where Seydou keeps the beat on the drums for the women and girls dancing in traditional costumes, with a vitality that will stand in stark contrast to the dehumanising horrors that follow.

From the outset, Garrone short-circuits the typical portrait of the African migrant in the Western collective imaginary: Seydou and Moussa are not fleeing war or the abuses of a military regime. They represent the GenZ economic migrant who wants to reach a world they’ve seen on TV and their phones, and when 70% of Africa’s population is under 30, that portrait is all the more valid. Children of the new generation, the two are also heirs of a long spiritual tradition, so Garrone complements this hero journey with the ritual of seeking blessings from the ancestors with the help of the local shaman. A ritual that the two young men perform with all the reluctance and comic relief of the profane present: the omens are good.

But what follows from the moment Seydou sneaks out of the house will be a descent into hell strewn with all possible torments: from Senegal, through the desert, the no man’s land in Libya, Tripoli, and across the Mediterranean to Italy. At every step, migrants are humiliated, tricked, robbed, blackmailed, abused, or downright tortured by various predators: migration is a business, and the bargaining chips are the suffering and despair of those who leave.

Seydou is separated from Moussa somewhere in the desert, and the destination is outranked by his search with a devotion that accentuates the need for companionship in the new life. Seydou does not continue his journey until he has accomplished this mission; then, he will be forced to take the helm of the boat with dozens of other cramped migrants under the open sky to cross the Mediterranean. “You just have to go straight and you’ll reach the other shore,” says the smuggler, although Seydou’s journey so far had been far from staying on track. Seydou is helped by an older man, one of the dozens he shares a cell with in a Libyan prison, to escape and regain his freedom through hard labour. Then, he is adopted by the Senegalese community in Tripoli; small gestures of humanity and community to remind us that the world in their journey is not made up only of monsters.

Amidst all this, the film’s merit and the way it avoids falling into the trap of “misery porn” come from the performance of non-professional actor Seydou Sarr (who received the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor at the Venice Film Festival) and cinematography. There is an assumed romantic and epic undertone to the film: when the camera pans across the desert and the silhouettes of migrants on the sand hills or the nightmarish sea shaking the boat full of people, surrounded by the infinite blue and no strip of land showing on the horizon. The destination is always out of sight, intangible, the vast natural expanses reflecting the exasperating lengths of time. Seydou plays all registers convincingly, from the hopeful eyes at the beginning to the horror in the torture chamber in Libya or the despair of being responsible for the lives of so many people.

The character ends up neither a martyr nor a mythical hero; Seydou is not that one-dimensional portrayal of a victim – a category in a scheme to stimulate empathy in Western audiences. He is a survivor who manages not to lose his humanity, a young man who doesn’t give up on his dream or those around him. The two dream scenes in the film don’t feel like a breather meant to keep viewers in their seats in the face of the overflow of cruelty; they feel like escapes of the mind from the imprisonment of life over which the character had lost all control, and like formulas by which the film breaks – voluntarily and temporarily – out of the narrative clichés of Western storytelling. 

Real, tangible Europe appears in the civilised, benevolent, yet ineffective voice of the operator who receives Seydou’s emergency call from the boat, a voice from the ether that has no concrete solution for those in danger of death, stuck in international waters, an administrative hassle that no one is willing to unravel. Europe appears again, briefly, through the noisy helicopter hovering over the boat for minutes, like an intervention from the heavens meant to end the torment, until the perspective shifts back to Seydou’s exhausted but happy face. Europe has no face, no open arms to welcome migrants after their life-risking journeys.

Garrone has been criticised for stopping the story here and not showing how migrants are met by the European states’ authorities, particularly Italy. Because often what follows is the imprisonment of the “captains” (in Italy, more than a thousand people are currently in prison for helping migrants cross the sea).

Incidentally, Seydou’s character is based on a 25-year-old man whom Garrone visited in a Sicilian prison for this very crime. An Italian activist documenting such cases comments that the film “doesn’t tell the whole story”. It can just as easily be criticised for ticking off a “trendy” theme in festivals. Or that it’s unnaturally bright and beautiful.

I would say that Garrone took every possible precaution not to falsify the story: throughout the production, he was assisted by refugees who had gone through all the experiences depicted in the film and tried to make a film about them, not about us, the viewers. Of course, it’s still an illusion with colonial underpinnings to think that you can cinematically capture a migrant’s perspective; but if we go about pointing fingers and guilt trips now, where do we stop when it comes to rendering the experience of otherness?

In an Italy where the anti-migrant laws are increasingly severe and the far right dominates the government, Io capitano seems to me an admirable political gesture and an artistic object that broadens the collective imaginary about the “migration crisis” of those like us, who happen to be on the “right” shore and see from a safe distance statistics or pictures of boats full of indistinct silhouettes.

“Io capitano” is now playing in theatres across the country.

Alexa Florescu

După 10 ani petrecuți în industria de carte, lucrează acum în publicitate. Are carnet de bilete la Elvire Popesco și abonamente la toate rețelele de streaming. Primul regizor pe care l-a cunoscut a fost Taika Waititi la prima ediție a festivalului de film horror de la Biertan. Când nu face account management și nu scrie despre filme, stă cu orele pe o insulă din IOR.