IO CAPITANO

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Storyline (warning: spoilers)

The 3,000 mile Odyssey of two Senegalese teenagers, who make their way from Dakar by bus and car and foot across several African countries to Tripoli and then onto the Mediterranean, is one of the more harrowing viewing experiences you’ll have in a theatre. The travails of these boys—who face robbers, prison, rapacious middle men, torture, sadism, a death-defying march across the Sahara, and for one of them, the forced captaincy of an ancient wooden boat—will make it hard at times to keep your eyes on the screen. And yet, as in a fable, or Hollywood, there is always a glimmer of hope.
The story of this Oscar-nominated Best Foreign Feature Film is told from the boys’ perspective and especially the more cautious of the two, Seydou (Seydou Sarr), who is coaxed into leaving home, family, and community by his more adventurous cousin, Moussa (Moustapha Fall). They aren’t political refugees—no gangs threaten them and their parents haven’t been killed. Although Seydou and Moussa are poor, they are not true economic refugees. They live closely with their siblings and mothers in small shacks, go to school, play soccer, find odd jobs; they don’t lack basic human needs. But they are driven by the dream, the dream of a better life in, vaguely, Europe, of improving the circumstances of their mothers and sisters, of “whites asking for your autograph.”
Noted Italian director Matteo Garrone has chosen to focus on these naïve youngsters—Seydou is 16—rather than the hardened adults who make the trip after leading lives of desperation in their native countries. The film was shot mostly in Senegal and Morocco, in 13 weeks. This Italian director never has his characters set foot on Italian shores. It’s not about what happens to them as immigrants in a European country, it’s about what they went through to try to get there, what Garrone wants us to see when we look at immigrants in our countries.