‘Io Capitano’: Venice Review

Dir: Matteo Garrone. Italy/Belgium. 2023. 121mins

The long and difficult migrant journey of two Senegalese teenagers with dreams of Europe becomes a hero’s quest in Matteo Garrone’s impressive new feature. Anchored by a powerful performance by first-time actor Seydou Sarr – a young musician with a solid TikTok following – it is a film that aims to see the European ‘migrant problem’ from the other end of the emotional and geographical tunnel, charting the hardships and injustices that sub-Saharans aiming to make it to Italy are forced to undergo.

The gritty realism of Io Capitano’s story is leavened throughout by recognizably ‘Garronian’ touches

On paper, it’s a big departure for the director of Tale of Tales, Dogman and Pinocchio – all dark fables marked by a strong visual style with a neo-Gothic edge. In reality, however, the gritty realism of Io Capitano’s story is leavened throughout by recognizably ‘Garronian’ touches; pools of magic realism, theatrical set pieces of colourful intensity. The film premiered in Venice Competition just one day after another powerful migrant odyssey, Green Border. But Io Capitano is very different from that black and white, cine-verite story of pushbacks on the frontier between Belarus and Poland. Only towards the end of Garrone’s film do we fully realise that he has once again made a fairy tale, the story of a fatherless African prince who meets and overcomes a series of trials on his road to self-realisation and manhood.

This double nature – fusing an embedded migrant journey along the lines of Michael Winterbottom’s In This World with a spiritual odyssey of African empowerment – should guarantee solid numbers when Io Capitano opens at home in Italy on 7 September. But this is also a film that may strike a chord with audiences in Europe and further afield. 

Onscreen titles divide Io Capitano into a series of geographical chapters that are staging posts on the journey of sixteen-year-old cousins Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall) from their home in Dakar, Senegal, across the Sahara Desert to Libya, where they will attempt the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean in a rusty hulk of a boat. Seydou lives at home with his mother and sisters. Things are a little crowded in the colourful family house for sure, but the family is doing okay, united by a love that bounces off the walls, living life with an exuberance that is reflected in the griot-style Senegalese music that spills over onto Andrea Farri’s vibrant soundtrack (the cousins are wannabe music stars who already write their own material). 

It is Seydou who is initially reluctant. Only after they consult a seedy marabout who gives his blessing to their journey is Moussa able to persuade his cousin to board a bus for Mali and Niger with the cash they have saved. As they are confronted with the harsh realities of the journey, the boys’ youthful ebullience turns to shock and numbed resilience. They are fleeced by fake ID providers and border guards before being forced to cross the Sahara on foot, but worse is to come when they finally arrive in Libya. The words blazoned across the football shirts the cousins wear – among them ‘UNICEF’ and ‘QATAR AIRWAYS’ – become infused with bitter irony.

During the desert trek Garrone deploys the first of a pair of supernatural dream inserts, this one involving a woman Seydou tries to help when she collapses in exhaustion. Any more would be too much, but these two gracefully executed sequences are just enough to lend a mythical sheen to Seydou’s quest after he is separated from Moussa. The prison Seydou is thrown into with hundreds of other migrants in the Libyan desert town of Sabha is grimly real, with its torture chambers and slave auctions, but it’s also a monster’s lair, a Baba Yaga’s hut, a place of dark horrors.

Paolo Carnera’s colour-soaked photography underlines the warmth in a story that seems to have hope hard-wired into it, even in its darkest moments. There is a beauty in these places where people die every day, in the desert escarpments, in the rolling dunes, even in the Libyan offshore oil platforms that glow in the night as a sixteen-year-old boy pilots a boatful of souls past them.