Movie theater. “Me Captain” by Matteo Garrone, the author of “Gomorra” films these heroic migrations which often end so tragically

Released this week, “Me Captain” has been visible since September in Italy, where it won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and where it is shown in schools. “A lesson for us,” says the director who sees young people recognizing themselves in his characters.

Me captaine by Italian Matteo Garrone was released on Wednesday January 3. The director of Gomorrah, Dogman And Pinocchiotackles a subject that concerns his country at the forefront: the fate of refugees who cross the Mediterranean at the risk of their lives, the story of a heroic odyssey.

Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall) are two young Senegalese who dream of another life, in Europe, the one they idealize on social networks. A first smuggler, the crossing of the desert, the first tragedies and the hell of the camps in Libya, where African candidates for exile are treated like slaves.

“The characters are like us!”

Matteo Garrone films for their part, as close as possible to this epic, the deaths abandoned on the way, the absolute poverty and this boat of which Seydou must take the helm, with the fear in his stomach of falling into this marine cemetery that has become the Mediterranean. Matteo Garrone explains: “He’s a 15-year-old kid, who finds himself piloting a boat to try to save 250 lives, who finds himself making a heroic gesture. He does it, comes up and says: ‘I’m the one who did it done, I’m the captain’ and they put him in prison. And at the same time, we know that Europe gives money to Libya, where there are human traffickers… “is an adventure film, I thought of Stevenson’s maritime story, Jack London. In Italy, it was released in September and was shown in many schools, where young people tell me: ‘But the characters are like We ! They have the same desires, the same dreams, we are like them.”

This epic story draws its strength from the veracity of its performers, mainly recruited from theater schools in Senegal: “We had to keep this innocence, relates Matteo Garrone, the actors had the same aspirations as their characters, to come to Italy or Europe. But they didn’t know what they were going to play, they lived with this tension of wanting to get there, day after day, they went through the ordeals, without having the certainty of arriving in Italy. It’s a lesson for us.”

There is in Me captain a breath of life, the one that animates its protagonists and which can only question us, here in Europe. For the sake of honesty, Matteo Garrone moderates his usual aesthetic, dares a few dreamlike flights, between Gomorrah And Pinochiohe said.