IO CAPITANO
Italy, Belgium 2023 Director Matteo Garrone Starring Seydou Sarr, Moustapha Fall Distribution 01 Distribution Running time 121’
Talking to Ciak about the genesis of this project, Matteo Garrone described it as “the biggest challenge I have ever faced and an experience I will carry with me all my life.” Io Capitano tells the story of Seydou and Moussa (Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall), two Senegalese boys with a passion for music who decide to leave for Europe, imagined as the promised land where they can realize their artistic dreams. Matteo Garrone accompanies the boys on an odyssey that, from Dakar, leads them to cross the desert and endure the violence of Libyan lagers until they reach the Mediterranean crossing. It is an epic journey experienced amid hope and suffering. Their journey from personal thus becomes universal: a metaphorical contemporary Odyssey, winding through the contradictions and cruelties of human beings. Garrone wrote the screenplay with Massimo Gaudioso, Massimo Ceccherini (who had already collaborated on the script of Pinocchio) and Andrea Tagliaferri, drawing inspiration from the true stories of Kouassi Pli, Adama Mamadou, Arnaud Zohin, Amara Fofana, Brhane Tareke and Siaka Doumbia.
Garrone, who made his directorial debut in 1996 with Terra di Mezzo, about the stories of the marginalization of foreign immigrants in Italy, landed in Venice with his second film Ospiti (1998), which Estate Romana followed. He won the David di Donatello for best screenplay with L’imbalsamatore in 2002, in 2008 the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes with Gomorra, and then also with the following, Reality (2012). In 2018, he presented Dogman at Cannes, and Marcello Fonte won the award for best male performance. The film was the Italian runner for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Subsequently, with Pinocchio, he gets two nominations for the 2021 Oscars.
Io capitano ideally reconnects with Garrone’s early cinema, but the director points out that “this time mine is a “counterfield” to Terra di Mezzo and Ospiti. Then, I told the story of the relationship of migrants with Italy. Io Capitano is the story of their journey, the epic tale of their adventure. It’s the coming-of-age journey of two boys chasing the promised land and facing a series of horrors; it’s a different angle from what we’re used to. We usually see the barges, those being rescued, the body count and the arrival in Lampedusa, but never what they experience during the journey. My approach was the same as in Gomorrah: to make the viewer relive this journey in the subjective, through the eyes of two boys who do not start from absolute misery but have the economic possibilities to face the crossing to Europe.”
