Lyrical, harrowing ‘Io Capitano’ offers epic immigration tale

“Io Capitano,” directed by Matteo Garrone, is an immigrant saga told almost entirely from the perspective of two teenagers from Senegal. They flee their homeland to pursue a pipe dream of pop music stardom in Italy, only to be brutally beaten down en route.

The enormity of their ordeal is belied by the film’s opening section. Sixteen-year-old Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and his cousin and best buddy Moussa (Moustapha Fall) are a rambunctious duo who love joining in the impromptu music and dance festivals that throng the streets of Dakar. Seydou is something of a jokester. When, for example, his highly protective mother complains that he “didn’t see her calls” on his cellphone, he quickly turns the words into a joyous chorus that his friends happily sing along to. 

The boys’ village life, though impoverished, is not shown to be oppressive. They are playfully close to their many siblings. Nothing is forcing them to flee except the promise of adventure and the Westernized lure of future celebrity. Immune to dire warnings about what could happen to them, and without informing family, these innocents board a bus for Mali. There they buy black-market fake passports and make the trek, first on a dangerously overcrowded bus, then on foot across the Sahara to Libya.

This Saharan sequence is ambiguously unsettling. The desertscapes, seemingly stretching out to infinity, are threatening-looking and yet breathtakingly beautiful. The band of immigrants plods through the sand, occasionally stepping past dead bodies left abandoned from earlier journeys. In the film’s most lyrical image, Seydou attempts to help an older woman who has fallen. He fantasizes that he is carrying her aloft as she floats serenely in the boiling air. The juxtaposition here of magical realism and hard realism, jarring at first, is emotionally overpowering.

Captured by brigands, the immigrants are herded into a remote Libyan prison camp where they are tormented and tortured. By this time, the boys have been separated. Seydou, battered, has another fantasy: He flies to his mother to beg her forgiveness. He wants her to know he’s alive.

What is most remarkable about Seydou is that, for all his fear and sorrow, he remains hearteningly resilient. He manages to make it to relative safety in Tripoli, where he searches for, and finds, Moussa, who is seriously ill. Still harboring the hope of making it to Italy, and desperate to get Moussa proper medical attention, Seydou warily signs on as the captain of an overloaded boat of refugees – a “people smuggler” – bound for Sicily. He embarks without any nautical experience. Pirates and the coast guard are an ever-present danger. He tells himself that “God is with us.”

Italian cinema has a long humanist history of casting nonactors in working-class roles because of the lived-in credibility they evoke. (This is perhaps best exemplified by the great “Bicycle Thieves” director, Vittorio De Sica.) Both Seydou and Moussa are played by first-time actors, and they radiate a fervid authenticity. Of course, in watching this film, we are also unceasingly made aware of the real horrific events behind its story. Tens of thousands of immigrants have died on these treks across the desert. More than 3,000 have died in the past year alone, according to Garrone during a post-screening discussion I attended.

Authenticity, of course, doesn’t automatically guarantee a good movie, and parts of “Io Capitano,” a nominee for an Oscar for best international feature, are disjointed and melodramatic. (Garrone’s most well-known previous feature is the heavy-handed Mafia epic “Gomorrah.”) I also question the aura of triumphant heroism that surrounds Seydou as he navigates his people to apparent safety. It glosses over the all-too-apparent dangers that undoubtedly lie in wait. Understandably wanting to leave audiences with a measure of hope, Garrone in some ways falsifies what is most powerful about his movie. 

But there is power, too, in dramatizing the endurance of people such as Seydou. Epic stories require epic bravery. 

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “Io Capitano” is not rated. The film is in French and Wolof with English subtitles.