Io Capitano starts with a Senegalese mother (Khady Sy) and the calm before the storm. She’s getting ready for bed and her son Seydou (Seydou Sarr) tells her possibly the worst thing someone in her position can hear: he has a dream, and that dream involves emigrating.
He’s not the first one, of course, and he won’t be the last. But Io Capitano, an Oscar nominee for Best International Feature Film, does as great a job at showcasing the perils of immigration in Africa as any movie has done in the past few years. US audiences might be familiar with how hard it is to emigrate to the US – and even that familiarity has its limits unless you come from a Latine family, but they know very little about the dangers of going from West Africa to the Coast of Libya to then try to find a way to Europe.
Why should they? Even in Europe, that awareness only comes so far.
Italian director Matteo Garrone attempts to change that with Io Capitano, a movie that is as much about the journey Seydou and his cousin Moussa (Moustapha Fall), embark on as it is about the people they meet along the way. Garrone, better known for the 2008 film Gomorrah, not only directed but wrote the screenplay for the film, after talking to multiple people who survived the journey.
But despite outstanding cinematography and clear intentionality behind every shot, Garrone doesn’t seem as concerned about chronicling the journey in a way that feels physically painful – though at times it is, but in taking you through it in a way that feels emotionally taxing. What Seydou and Moussa are going through is hard, and at times, inhumane, and the fact that it feels like that reminds those of us watching that we are all part of a whole, even when we are not the ones suffering.
However, Garrone also manages to, somehow, ground the movie in goodness and hope, even in the darkest moments. Empathy shines brightest when people should not feel it or should have a hard time demonstrating it, and yet find ways to do so. If there’s something that will reawaken your hope in humanity it is the idea that at their worst, people can sometimes be the best version of themselves.
Io Capitano could have been a painful movie, and at times it will make you feel bad. It needs to make you feel bad because there are things that you cannot process any other way, that are too horrible. It will certainly make you reevaluate how much you know about the world and how you choose to willingly ignore it because that makes your everyday life easier.
But it is also fundamentally a movie about how even in the darkest moments, hope can be a choice. And if Seydou and Moussa can choose hope, and can sail a boat even when it feels like they aren’t going to get anywhere, then who are we to judge? And more importantly, why shouldn’t we have a little hope too?
Agree? Disagree? What did you think of Io Capitano? Share with us in the comments below!
Io Capitano is in theaters now.
