In this heroic story, real people risk their lives to come to Europe

At the end of “Io Capitano” (“I Captain”)Matteo Garrone’s gripping nominee for Best International Film at next month’s Academy Awards, a map follows the journey of the film’s two teenage protagonists: over 5,500 kilometers from Dakar, Senegal, to Sicily, via the scorching desert of Niger, gruesome Libya prisons and a nerve-wracking crossing of the Mediterranean on board a rickety ship.

Such perilous journeys, made every year by countless Africans in search of a new life in Europe, are “one of the great dramas of our time,” Garrone said in a recent interview, and “Io Capitano” is framed as an epic , contemporary story. Odyssey, with protagonists no less brave than Homer’s hero.

“It’s a journey that is an archetype so that everyone can identify with it,” says Garrone, who is best known to international audiences for the hyper-realistic 2008 drama.Gomorrah‘ and are dark and fantastic “Pinocchio” (2019).

“Io Capitano,” he said, is also a “document of contemporary history.” This month alone, more than 2,000 people reached European shores by crossing the Mediterranean, while at least 74 people died, bringing to more than 29,000 the number of people who have disappeared into that sea in the past decade. according to the International Organization for Migrationan agency of the United Nations.

Many Europeans learn about these landings and deaths from short news clips, often accompanied by snippets of lawmakers promising to stop illegal migration. Garrone’s film, which won the Silver Lion for best director at last year’s Venice Film Festival, goes beyond the statistics with a plot based on stories of real people crossing the Mediterranean.

Garrone, who lives in Rome, said he was inspired to write “Io Capitano” several years ago after visiting a Sicilian center who assists minors and hears the story of Fofana Amara, a man from Guinea who was only fifteen when, unable to swim and with no nautical experience, human traffickers in Libya forced him to pilot a dilapidated ship carrying 250 people to the Sicilian port of Augusta transported.

As the ship approached Sicily, Amara recalled, a helicopter flew overhead and he started shouting to get his attention. After being rescued, he was arrested as the ship’s captain and spent two months in prison before being released, as he was a minor. He was given two years probation.

When he heard Amara’s story, Garrone said, “he immediately thought of Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Joseph Conrad.”

In the film, Amara’s story is told by the character Seydou, who leaves Senegal with his cousin Moussa, driven by youthful enthusiasm and the prospect of musical fame in Europe. After a series of calamities and setbacks, Seydou is forced to lead a ship full of migrants across the rough Mediterranean, despite never having sailed before.

In a recent interview, Amara said he hoped the film would help viewers “understand what we’re going through.” It has now been ten years since Amara made his journey, and he said it was painful to see that such dangerous and often fatal crossings are still being made, and that they are still met with general indifference by the European public.

“People are still coming, people are dying, some make it, others don’t, some we don’t know their fate,” says Amara, who later trained as a skipper at a maritime school and then moved to Belgium, where the wait is on. to assess his asylum application.

To write the script, Garrone spoke with dozens of others who had also made the crossing across the Mediterranean, including Mamadou Kouassi, whose story became one of the film’s main narrative sources. Nearly two decades ago, Kouassi left Ivory Coast at the age of 19 and embarked on a traumatic three-year odyssey through deserts, Libyan camps and a sea crossing that left three fellow passengers dead.

“I call myself a survivor,” he said in an interview.

While speaking to the audience while promoting “Io Capitano,” Kouassi noted that people were moved to tears by the film. “I say it is not just my story, but the story of many people who suffer this tragedy to come to Europe,” he said in the interview, adding that some of the things he had witnessed were too horrific to be recorded in the script to record.

Kouassi now works in a city near Naples as a cultural mediator, helping newcomers from Africa and elsewhere navigate the ins and outs of a continent that generally doesn’t welcome them.

“It’s human to want to travel,” Kouassi said. “People are made to move – no one can stop that. It’s like the sea: you can’t stop the flow of water.” This is particularly echoed in Africa, the continent where the the world’s youngest populationwith 70 percent of sub-Saharan Africa being under the age of 30.

Garrone said he did not set out to make a political film, but that “Io Capitano” “inevitably became political” because it spoke of the belief that everyone should have the right to “move freely, discover new worlds and experienced”. .” For the director, it was important that the film’s protagonists do not leave their homes because of war, famine or climate change, but instead go in the hope of a better future.

“Io Capitano” was shot in 2022 in Senegal, Morocco and Sicily, and migrants worked on the crew and as extras, letting Garrone know when they felt the story was wrong. “We know that cinema is a collective art form,” Garrone said. “In this case it is even more, because we really made it together.”

The director kept the film’s Senegalese leads, Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall, in the dark about the fate of their characters. He shot chronologically and they were not given a pre-written script. “I wanted them to have a constant pressure without knowing whether they would arrive in Italy or not,” he said.

For the actors, who were both teenagers during filming, it was a life-changing experience.

Fall said that while he didn’t know anyone who crossed the Mediterranean, he very much felt a “responsibility to be the voice of those who don’t have one,” he said. “It wasn’t easy.” Since filming began, he has amassed more than a million followers on TikTok, many of whom dominate his sense of style. “My dream is to one day see my own designs on the streets,” he added.

Sarr, who won an award for best young actor at last year’s Venice Film Festival, said “Io Capitano” was “important for Africa and for Senegal.” Although he hopes to continue acting, he said what he really wanted to do was be a professional footballer.

When asked if he hoped to pursue those dreams in Europe, he immediately responded: “Oh yes.”