Homer’s Odyssey gave the epic its itinerant template, and there is an undeniably Homeric quality to Io Capitano that cuts across national and racial boundaries. Since the film was released in Italy, last September, its Italian director, Matteo Garrone, has helped to arrange numerous screenings for the country’s schoolchildren. “A young audience … goes to see this kind of movie thinking they will go to sleep because it’s about migrants,” Garrone tells me. “But then they discover—I know this because I met hundreds and hundreds of students—that there are two kids like them with the same desires, the same dreams, and … family that is worried for them.”
At the beginning of Io Capitano, now in theaters in the U.S., cousins Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall) are two carefree teenagers determined to leave their Senegalese village for the promise of a better life in Europe. Indeed, it’s hard to square their joyous lives in Senegal, epitomized by their attendance of a sabar (a dance party for Senegalese teenage girls), with the hellish journey that they embark upon.
But Garrone notes that if anything, he and his co-screenwriters toned down some of the stories that they were told by migrants who had made the voyage from Africa to Europe: “Sometimes what they told us was so violent and inhumane that if we had included it, we would have run the risk of not being believable.”
“A young audience … goes to see this kind of movie thinking they will go to sleep because it’s about migrants. But then they discover … that there are two kids like them with the same desires, the same dreams.”
Io Capitano, which won the Silver Lion for best director at last year’s Venice Film Festival and has been nominated for next month’s Academy Awards in the international-feature category, took Garrone eight years to make. “I was very worried about the fact that it was not my culture,” the 55-year-old director explains. “The danger of touching on such a delicate subject from the point of view of a privileged Italian took a lot of time for me to digest.”
But if not Garrone, then who? His first two feature films, Terra di Mezzo (1996) and Ospiti (1998), both blurred the boundary between fiction and documentary to tell stories about foreign migrants living and working in Rome. For Io Capitano, Garrone says that he “wanted to finally give a voice to those who don’t usually have a voice. We also wanted to give visual form to a journey that we don’t usually see.”
The director has always been interested in telling stories of boys and young men whose innocence is ravaged by the cutthroat environments that they grow up in. He likens Io Capitano, which contains some gruesome scenes of Seydou being tortured by the Libyan Mafia, to both his 2008 Italian crime film, Gomorrah, adapted from Roberto Saviano’s Mafia tell-all of the same name, and his 2019 film Pinocchio, which hewed closely to Carlo Collodi’s surprisingly gritty 1883 source novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio.
“There were some moments that reminded me of documentary-like scenes that I filmed for Gomorrah, but also, when Seydou leaves his family and his mother without saying anything, it is similar to Pinocchio’s search for the Land of Toys,” Garrone says. “Both characters go out into the world and discover what a violent place it can be.”
Io Capitano is in theaters in the U.S. now
Tobias Grey is a Gloucestershire, U.K.–based writer and critic, focused on art, film, and books