Given the challenges that many migrants face when traveling to a new land, it makes sense to assume that they’re fleeing harrowingly nightmarish realities. But the scenes that director Matteo Garrone uses to open his heartrending Io Capitano are far from nightmarish. Garrone’s big-dreaming migrant characters aren’t running away from something so much as they’re running toward it. The possibility that their goal is little more than a mirage makes this epic tale’s often horrendous journey even more wrenching.
The Dakar neighborhood where teenaged Seydou (Seydou Sarr) lives with his mother (Ndeye Khady Sy) and siblings is a chaotic sprawl of ramshackle buildings and bustling markets. A street party practically explodes as a spectacle of drumming, dancing, and colorful homemade couture. Though the Dakar of the film is clearly poor, with few modern conveniences and not much of a job market, it hardly seems the kind of place worth risking death to get away from.
But while Io Capitano is primarily the story of a journey, it’s also about the power of fantasy. Seydou and his cousin Moussa (Moustapha Fall) work as day laborers, socking away money for their escape. Ambitious and borderline-foolish dreamers, they compose and perform catchy love songs on the streets of Dakar while planning for stardom in Europe. Seydou is the more sensitive and anxious of the two, and he lets the brashly confident Moussa talk him past the warnings they keep being given by concerned adults. “Do you have any idea of how many people died at sea?” Seydou’s mother asks, terrified after hearing his plans. “You’re so gullible.”
The story quickly cuts away any belief that Seydou and Moussa’s journey will be an easy one that concludes with them winning the next Eurovision and sending money back to their families. The two board a bus and take off across the desert, buzzing optimism about their future. But each step closer to Europe knocks away another illusion about the rightness of their decision. A brusque fake passport merchant (Joe Lassana) takes more of the cousins’ limited funds than they had planned for. Later, Seydou fails to save a woman (Beatrice Gnonko) who collapses and dies in a forced march across a harsh desert. The boys are then thrown by a Libyan militia into a hellish prison echoing with the screams of the tortured who failed to pay ransoms. Seydou is split from Moussa, finding himself alone on the Tunisian coast among thousands of other Africans scraping together what they can for the last push toward their destinations.
The beautiful landscapes are captured with a sparkling and color-popping clarity by cinematographer Paolo Carnera that exudes a beatific warmth, particularly a scene where the woman Seydou tried to save suddenly takes flight, her green garments fluttering in the desert wind. These graceful moments make a jarring contrast with the predatory characters waiting in the gorgeous terrain for travelers who ignored cautionary tales. Io Capitano is unsparing in its depiction of what people will do to those they believe are helpless.
At the same time, Garrone isn’t crafting a Dante-esque descent but a hero’s journey. The film shows both the immense challenges faced by the migrants and their capacity to overcome them. Seydou’s somewhat mousy and gentle manner turns out to hide a surprisingly steely strength and resourcefulness. That revelatory shift restores an agency sometimes lacking in migrant stories and also proves crucial for the film’s conclusion, where Seydou is suddenly made responsible not just for himself and Moussa but hundreds of other lives. The harrowing yet thrilling sequence (based on a true story about a teenage African migrant) builds like the rest of the film on a docudrama realism while simultaneously reaching toward the mythological.
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