Matteo Garrone tells us the inside story of his new film, “Me Captain”

In “Me Captain”, in theaters Wednesday, Matteo Garrone narrates in a strong, epic story, the journey of African migrants towards Europe. We met the Italian filmmaker, director of the unforgettable “Gomorra”, to discuss a film already awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

It’s an epic filmed in Me Captainin theaters Wednesday January 3, Matteo Garrone : that of two young 16-year-old boys decided to leave their native Senegal and risk everything to reach Europe and pursue the dream of becoming singers. Told between realism and fable, sometimes with a lot of poetry, the film gives pride of place to the values ​​of fraternity and solidarity. Awarded at the Venice Film Festival, nominated for the Golden Globes in the Best Foreign Language Film category and shortlisted for the Oscars, Me Captain, released in Italy last September, is off to a good start to its international career. We met Matteo Garrone during a visit to Paris at the end of December.

Franceinfo Culture: Where did you get the desire to show in a film the long, painful and dangerous journey of African migrants to Europe?
Matteo Garrone: It is the desire to tell and visually show a part of the journey that we do not know about these migrants. And therefore create a sort of reverse shot compared to the images we are used to seeing. We are used to seeing the boats arriving – when they manage to arrive – and hearing the ritual counting of the living, the dead: the numbers therefore. And over the years, we forget that behind these numbers, there are people. They are often young people who have the same desire as us or our children: to pursue a dream, to travel.

You also show life before the trip, in Senegal, which is rarely mentioned…
I chose to tell the story of Senegal because it is a country where there was not a conflict, it could have been the Ivory Coast or another country. It was important for me to say that we only have the right to travel if we are fleeing a war. The film chronicles the constant violation of basic human rights. Why do we have the right to move around, and not them? This is the reason that pushes many young people – and we know that 70% of the population in Africa is made up of young people – to defy this journey of death to pursue their dream.

In Senegal, you depict a happy existence despite poverty…
But yes, absolutely, why hide it? Why not say that even in poverty, this worthy poverty, there can be joy? Why fall into these stereotypes according to which they should all be sad? It reminded me of other images, the smiles and joy of the inhabitants of Naples filmed in this very difficult post-war period, by the neorealist filmmakers, Rossellini and De Sica. When I was filming in this popular district of Dakar, I had the feeling of returning to that era of films with Sofia Loren… An atmosphere where there is still a sense of family identity, of communication between people, where no there is not yet this unbridled individualism… But at the same time, it’s true, this virus creeps inside, this legitimate and human dream of looking elsewhere for something else and more.

The film is in Wolof and in the language of the other countries crossed. Why was it important that the voice of the film be African?
It was important, yes, unfortunately [rires]…It’s really not easy to lead in a language you don’t understand [rires] ! Being in Senegal and people speaking Wolof, the choice of this language seemed to me the most natural and coherent in relation to our approach. Because it is a film which must, in a certain way, restore a state of life: fundamentally, it is also a document of contemporary history. We also tried to dub the film, but we lost a lot of the strength and the emotion. Character voices are difficult to replace. And even if I didn’t understand anything, I must say that Wolof is a truly musical language. So I was leading by ear.

Like other of your films, “Me Captain” takes the form of a fable, the moral of which is that only the spirit of humanity can save the world. But it is also a very realistic film which hides nothing of the horror of these journeys. How did you manage to bring these two opposing dimensions together?
Yes, it’s true. Sometimes, during filming, I had the feeling of being in an acrobatic balance between Gomorrah And Pinocchio ! Over time, we have the feeling of reliving things that we have already told. For this film, certain moments took me back to Gomorrah (2008), with this rawness of the image and an almost documentary approach. Others referred me to Pinocchio, which I shot in 2019 : the discovery of the violence of the world through a training novel of a boy who sets out to pursue his dream and who little by little is embarked on a journey to hell. It is a training novel.

The film also has the dimension of an initiation rite…
Absolutely. This is what a Senegalese friend told me: in the past, there were rites of passage. In a sense, my character’s is a rite of passage.

This film also talks about friendship, fraternity…
It is a film in which great human solidarity in suffering emerges. And this character manages to remain human until the end, it’s an important aspect of the story. Basically, it’s the hero’s journey. Moreover, the structure is that of a Homeric fable, which makes the film accessible to a wide audience. Including among young people.

Is that what you noticed?
Yes, in Italy, the film is shown in many schools. And when I go to meet the students, the majority of them have not gone to see the film in the cinema, because initially the theme and even the genre of film do not interest them. But then, these young people find characters on the screen who are their age and with whom they identify. Because they recognize themselves both in the relationship with their parents, in the desire to experiment against the advice of parents who are concerned, in their unfailing friendship. And in dreams: who becomes a singer, who becomes a footballer… In any case, in the dream of seeing the world and the desire to risk everything for that…

A question about your social commitment which is inseparable from cinema. This is true for this film – you also relay a number of migrant support associations – but also for the previous ones – you notably chose some of your actors in the prison environment… Is commitment inherent in your cinema?
It’s something that comes in spite of me. I’m not starting from there, but ultimately, as you make me see, there is something that comes back… I’ve defended myself a little from it until now, because I always associate a bit of this dimension with films thesis, which I avoid. But it actually exists inside my cinema.

Let’s return to the cinematographic dimension of “Me Captain”: the photo is very beautiful, with very pictorial colors. How did the filming go, did you have any difficulties?
No that’s not it. Let’s say that it’s not easy to make a “beautiful” film, that is to say with work of expressive research, and ensure, at the same time, that this work is “invisible”. The spectator must forget the artifice in some way, he must experience this journey without ever feeling our presence and a form of stylistic satisfaction on our part: it’s tedious in general, but on a film like ours, it can really become intolerable. So each time, we had to find ideas, figurative, expressive, visual, which were beautiful, but while remaining invisible.

There is, for example, this very beautiful shot from the film, where we see silhouettes of men and women in the desert in Chinese shadows…
The landscape often has a dramaturgical value: it is a character in the film because these are epic stories, and the epic side is linked to the solitude of man in the middle of infinite landscapes. So, we frequently have these shots of wide open spaces, but they serve to tell the story of the journey. Each time, we asked ourselves whether the chosen shots actually served the story. Just as it was important, through the photography of cinematographer Paolo Carnera, to be simple. So the light had to be neat, but natural. And the same goes for costumes. We used these football jerseys because that’s what we saw in most of the photos collected. With colors becoming more and more faded as the journey progressed. Once in Libya, these jerseys were completely bleached. These are things that we don’t notice, but which exist, they are just invisible.