'Io Capitano': Oscars contender strives to humanize harrowing journey of African migrants

For Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone, his film Io Capitano (now in theatres and nominated in the 2024 Oscars) was about humanizing and bringing emotion to the statistics we see and read about the journey of migrants West Africa to Europe.

"The inspiration starts from the desire to show a part of the journey that we don't see, to give visual form to a part of the journey that we usually don't see," Garrone told Yahoo. "We're used to seeing only the last part, ... when they both arriving in Italy, when they succeed to arrive, the ... count of the people alive, people who died, and the numbers."

"So we try to humanize these numbers, we try to put the camera on the other side and to show to the audience, what does it mean to make this epic journey, ... the emotional experience of making the journey through the eyes of this contemporary hero."

In the "odyssey" that is Io Capitano, actors Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall, from Senegal, play teenage cousins Seydou and Moussa, who we follow from Senegal to Italy, including crossing the Libya desert, and the Mediterranean Sea.

"I was looking for actors that could keep this innocence," Garrone said. "So we cast young actor in Senegal and we found Seydou [Sarr] and Moustapha [Fall], [who] immediately became very close friends."

"I thought that Seydou could be perfect for the role because he was very shy, and had many elements in common with the character that we wrote."

For the actors from Senegal, who had never left the country, Garrone also pulled from their own personal lives for the story, particularly their love of music and dreaming about discovering the world.

But to maintain that "innocence" he wanted, Garrone never gave the actors the full script.

"I decided to shoot, as I do, in chronologic way, and to [not tell] them about the story too much, so I didn't give the script to them," Garrone said. "Day by day, they were discovering a new adventure."

'This adventure is a dark page of our contemporary history'

The film includes beautiful shots of sweeting landscapes, paired with terrifying moments of this journey, including encounters with human smugglers and being in a corrupt prison in Libya. But Garrone stressed that he always wanted to make this coming-of-age story as authentic as possible. That included working with people who have experienced this journey themselves.

"There was only one way to make this movie, to do it with them," Garrone said. "So I've been listening to their story, made the movie together, ... they were co-directors in a way."

"For them, it was important to show to the world, what does it mean to make this adventure, and in the last 10 years, 30,000 people have died to make this journey. So it was very important to be true, to be authentic, for the respect of the people that have survived, for the people that died. ... We worked a lot ... on research and documentation. So we wanted it to be true, honest, simple, but at the same time, cinema is a form of art that gives to the audience the possibility to live emotion through the eyes of the actors, through the eyes of the character."

The filmmaker highlighted that in Italy, France and Africa, Io Capitano has been shown to school-aged children, and that revealed that these young people felt an immediate connection to these characters.

"They discovered that behind the numbers, they are kids like them, the same desires, same dreams," Garrone said.

As Garrone described, the film isn't about violence, but rather "human solidarity."

"This adventure is a dark page of our contemporary history, so at the end, we didn't make a movie to give an answer to the audience or a thesis, ... we wanted to show ... the journey and then everybody can find the consequence, find the answer, or be more sensitive about this," he said.