The news has been showing images of migrants risking their lives for years in their dream of reaching Europe in search of a better future. This is the case of Seydou and Moussa, two teenage cousins from Senegal who undertake a journey full of dangers in their desire to dedicate themselves to rap music in an Old Continent that does not exactly await them with open arms. From the hostility of the Sahara desert to the horror of Libya's detention centers, controlled by mafias, to his final odyssey on an old ship loaded with 250 people of which Seydou is forced to take the helm without any experience.
An epic journey that Matteo Garrone portrays in I, Captain, a film that hit theaters this week and is told as if it were a youthful adventure story. “The idea to shoot the film came to me after talking to many sub-Saharan teenagers who referred to the trip to Europe as an adventure. And, in some way, in his imagination Europe was something similar to what the country of games was for Pinocchio in my previous film,” explains the filmmaker in conversation with this newspaper. “The protagonists have been told that the trip is very dangerous and that they could die, but they have that freshness and unconsciousness typical of young people of wanting to experience it on their own. When they undertake the journey, it is already too late and they cannot escape the circle of an atrocious reality,” continues Garrone, who vindicates the migrants as people “with dreams like ours” and highlights the “heroic” character of these young people in their efforts. to achieve your goal. “For me they embody the contemporary epic,” he cries.
In a Europe that has closed the migration pact with a tightening of reception requirements, the director of Gomorrah and Dogman claims that this scenario of injustice and systematic violation of human rights would be remedied “if more visas were granted and the flow was regulated.” migratory". With I Captain, Garrone returns to the drama of immigration that he already addressed in his first feature films: Terra di mezzo (1996) and Ospiti (1998). But this time, it focuses on "what happens from the moment these boys leave their countries until they land in the Mediterranean" in a story that draws on many survival stories, especially that of the Ivorian Mamadou Kouassi, who suffered torture and was imprisoned. and he escaped only after being sold as a slave to a local man who needed workers for masonry work on his property and who eventually freed him.
In fiction he is played by the Senegalese Seydou Sarr in a moving performance that earned him the Marcello Mastroianni award for best new actor at the Venice Film Festival, where Garrone collected the Silver Lion for best director. “We did a very long casting. Moustapha Fall, who plays Moussa, was already studying theater, and Seydou also comes from a family of actors, although his true passion was football. He perfectly embodies a very complex teenager and has lived the journey almost parallel to that of his character. In fact, he never gave the actors the script and day after day they lived the adventure in chronological order. And Seydou had the same hope as his character of reaching Italy. From the beginning, a great friendship was created between the two actors,” says Garrone proudly, who included extras who had already experienced that "terrible journey."
The story is the result of a co-production between Italy, Belgium and France. "Filming was really complicated and doing it in a language I didn't understand made it even more difficult. We were able to rebuild Libya in Morocco and filming on the boat was extremely difficult because it was a fishing vessel, there were many of us and it was not easy to find space to move. In reality, when making an adventure film, every difficulty enriches the final result," he says.
Yo Capitan is up for the Golden Globe and hopes to be among the finalists for the Oscar for best international film. “The awards help give visibility to the film, which has been ensemble and all of us who have worked on it share the joy. But the most important thing is the public response.” And he maintains that nothing makes him more excited that young audiences agree to see his film, an initiative that is being carried out in Italy through schools. "The film is very accessible to them because the protagonists are the same age and then it deals with the hero's journey, a narrative structure that they know very well and they can see the issue of migrants from another angle. Because behind the numbers that we are used to Let's see, there are the same desires and dreams that they have," he says.
