The return to the silver screen for Roman auteur Matteo Garrone at the 80th edition of the Venice Film Festival was met with curiosity. Four years on from his whimsical, live-action adaptation of Pinocchio, the enigmatic Italian returned to the Lido in 2023 with Io Capitano (‘I Captain’), an epic odyssey adventure film about two Senegalese teenagers who embark on a deadly trip from Senegal to Italy in search of fantasy and success. The film is told through the eyes of Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and his cousin Moussa (Moustapha Fall), who are desperate to leave their lives in Dakar behind in hopes of achieving musical stardom in Europe—a mythical destination where all dreams seem to come true. The film opens in their hometown, where the boys split their time between working laborious construction jobs, attending high school, and socialising with family and friends. Seydou knows nothing about the conditions awaiting him in Europe or the so-called ‘migrant crisis.’ Instead, the destination acts as a potent symbol. Seydou is Garrone’s Odysseus and Europe is his Ithaca.

Io Capitano marks not only a return to the themes that propelled him into international cinematic stardom with Gomorrah in 2008, but it also bears a loose connection to his debut feature Land in Between (1996). Taking the form of a triptych, this docu-fiction film tells the stories of three sets of migrants trying to survive in an Italian capital that offers them very little. Shot in a crude, documentary style, it makes for a stark visual contrast to cinematographer Paolo Carnera’s disarmingly expansive camerawork in Io Capitano. Land in Between served as an introduction to Garrone’s sensitivities—or lack thereof—as a filmmaker, with the then 25-year-old willing to let his characters, many of whom are played by non-professional actors re-enacting their own grim experiences, suffer for the sins of the (presumedly Italian) viewer.

Garrone, a white Italian who grew up in the Roman arts scene (the son of successful theatre critic Nico Garrone and photographer Donatella Rimoldi), has made no attempts to conceal his incongruous links to Io Capitano’s subject matter and has worked extensively with real-life migrants from the writing phases to filming to create a faithful depiction. “Every moment on the set,” Garrone told The Guardian, “I had people beside me who had actually lived through the experience of being tortured in Libya, or walked through the Sahara, so they could help me tell their experience in detail.” Garrone attempts to convey to Western audiences the experiences of people usually reduced by their politicians and media to statistics and sensationalised news. The majority of the film is spoken in the Niger–Congo Wolof language and many of the film’s actors have not acted before, including Fall and Sarr. Explaining his reasoning to Jane Campion in an interview in Variety, Garrone stated that he kept the scripts from the leads, who had never left Senegal, to keep them in suspense about whether their characters ever make it to Europe. Despite the dubious ethics surrounding Garrone’s directorial decision, it is the anguished and desperate performances of Fall and Sarr, the latter of whom won Venice’s Marcello Mastroianni Prize for best newcomer for the role, that make the world of Io Capitano so intensely visceral.

Although questions should and have been raised as to whether Garrone and his primarily Italian crew should be the authors of Seydou and Moussa’s story, his intentions seem as sincere as they have been since his earliest films. Inspired to make the film after hearing a story of a young African migrant who managed to sail a dilapidated and overcrowded ship across the Mediterranean, Garrone wanted to tell a story that plagues European headlines from the perspective of a pair of voyagers from Africa, instead of the Europeans looking down upon their continental neighbours.

For the director known internationally for gritty crime dramas set in the rough outskirts of Italy’s historic cities, Garrone’s new film appears to be a major break from his previous decade’s work. Io Capitano marks a point of intersection for the director, however, where the brutal realism of his earlier works is interwoven with his more recent explorations of fantasy, as well as his characteristic cynicism toward contemporary Italian society. Constructing the film in the ‘hero’s journey’ model should be unsurprising for those who have followed Garrone’s films since Gomorrah, a brutal exposé of the Italian mafia and takedown of Hollywood’s fascination with the mob.

Following Gomorrah, Garrone has failed to synthesise his obsessions with verité and myth, flip-flopping with middling results. First came Reality (2012), a dark, Truman Show-esque study of Italy’s obsession with Big Brother. Then 2015’s Tale of Tales, a highly stylised, English-language fantasy based on the writings of 17th-century author Giambattista Basile. From here, 2018 saw a return to the Italian suburbs in Dogman, a mob-adjacent revenge drama based on a real-life murder. Finally, a year later, Garrone released the aforementioned live-action adaptation of Pinocchio, which opened to lacklustre interest everywhere but his home country. Four years on—and financed in part due to Pinocchio’s domestic success—Io Capitano is the result of a decade’s worth of experimentation. Garrone has stated that the migration from Africa to Europe is the “Odyssey of our modern times,” and he therefore frames Io Capitano in the ‘epic film’ mould: the perfect genre for the director to mix his signature, brutal realism with the mythological flair that a story of such extreme proportions deserves.

The major moment of synthesis comes at the midway point of the film (and on the theatrical poster). Seydou and Moussa are trekking across the seemingly endless dunes of the Sahara Desert, their path littered with the bodies of their Euro-bound predecessors. Seydou, who is closer to the back of the group, hears an older woman scream for help and tends to her despite pleas from Moussa, who fears they’ll be left behind by the ruthless smugglers, to carry on.

Seydou eventually starts walking again, hand in hand with the lady, who is now levitating several feet above him—her green robes creating a mirage in the vast desert. Like Odysseus and the Sirens, Seydou is presented with his first task to overcome—resulting in our hero risking his life to help his fellow traveller. It is this moment of ethereality that separates Garrone’s film from the work of his European peers addressing the story of African migration. It works in particularly strong contrast to the depictions found in the films of fellow acclaimed European auteurs, compatriot Luca Guadagnino and Austrian Michael Haneke, for whom African migrants function more as a plot device for their white protagonists than actual characters in A Bigger Splash (2015) and Happy End (2017) respectively. Seydou’s magical moment of imagination in the wake of such extremity invokes a greater level of empathy for the experience of an African migrant, which has rarely been seen in European dramas.

Where Garrone doesn’t dwell on the political and cultural minutiae intrinsic to his characters’ stories, he is successful in humanising and even making heroes of the migrants that his country and continent so vehemently reject. Italy’s far right PM Giorgia Meloni, who in October said “illegal immigration threatens citizens’ security and quality of life,” is currently taking over many of the country’s cultural institutions, including national broadcaster RAI and the Venice Film Festival itself. This means that it will most likely become harder for stories like Io Capitano to reach Italian audiences. Whether deemed compassionate or exploitative, Garrone’s Io Capitano conveys that before the European ‘migrant crisis’ story there was another one of struggle and hope happening in Africa. As the film draws to a close and the boys inch nearer to Italy, Garrone reminds viewers that when Seydou and Moussa’s formidable story ends, another one begins.

Io Capitano is now screening in Australian cinemas.

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Andrew Tabacco is a film writer based in Naarm, with a specific interest in contemporary international cinema and the film festival landscape. Beginning writing after noticing a decline in platforms for discussing and promoting arthouse and independent cinema in Australia, Andrew co-founded and co-edits KinoTopia, a Naarm-centric publication for film criticism, analysis, and cinema listings.