Seydou and Moussa, two 16-year-old cousins, decide to leave their native Senegal for Europe. Their hopes for a better life will quickly be tempered by the great dangers of such a journey.
Silver Lion for Best Director at the last Venice Film Festival, Matteo Garrone (Reality, Dogman) tells in Io Capitano (Me captain), finalist for the Oscar for best international film, the story of two young Senegalese migrants who try to reach Europe.
Io Capitano follows a 16-year-old teenager, Seydou (Seydou Sarr), a talented percussionist who decides to leave the promiscuity and precariousness of his bad neighborhood in Dakar, with his cousin Moussa, for the promise of a better life in Europe.
The boys reach Libya, crossing Mali, Niger and the Sahara. On the way, they are robbed, scammed by smugglers and police officers, tortured by mafiosi, sold as slaves, until Seydou is reluctantly made captain of a makeshift boat which sets sail for Sicily. Even though he has never sailed, he finds himself responsible for 250 passengers in bad shape.
Matteo Garrone, who is also a co-writer, was inspired by his meeting with a teenager in a refugee camp in Italy to tell this story from the point of view of those who risk their lives at sea and in the desert. He was advised on filming by migrants who survived this traumatic experience.
Garrone is interested not only in the vicissitudes, but also in the lives of these migrants too often condemned to becoming obscure statistics in the media. While other filmmakers have most often been content to discuss the difficulties of integrating these migrants into Europe, the Italian gives them a face, a dignity, a humanity, by recounting their obstacle course.
His characters, very credible, speak Wolof, French, English, Italian or Arabic, and are played by a majority of non-professional actors, starting with Seydou Sarr, remarkable, who had no professional experience before this first role. Which did not prevent the 17-year-old from winning the Marcello Mastroianni Prize for Best Newcomer at the Venice Film Festival.
We follow the perilous journey of these people treated like cattle, fearing the worst and discovering the inconceivable. Seydou, a gullible and smiling teenager, gradually discovers the worst in human nature. The ordeal will make a man of him.
After the fantasy of Pinocchio, the Italian filmmaker rediscovers the naturalistic style that revealed him on the international scene 15 years ago, thanks to the brutal gangster film Gomorrah. The images he depicts are sometimes cruelly beautiful, sometimes unbearable. Above all, they are necessary. As is this moving and impactful film about these great forgotten people of our time.
Indoors
Now showing in original version with French subtitles and in original version with English subtitles
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Drama
Io Capitano (V. F.: Me captain)
Matteo Garrone
With Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall
2:01 a.m.