6 Nov 2024
Director: Matteo Garrone
Italy, Belgium, France
2023
121 min
From Matteo Garrone comes this searing tale of two young boys’ migration from Africa to Europe. Io Capitano is an odyssey traversing city, desert and ocean from West Africa to the Mediterranean Sea. Two Senegalese teenagers, Seydou and Moussa, leave Dakar for Italy. On a journey neither of the boys could have anticipated, they experience the dangers and the beauty of the desert, the intense brutality of detention centres in Libya and the perils of the sea in their pursuit of a better life. Highly emotional and honestly felt, Io Capitano is a story of epic scale but one which doesn’t lose sight of the individual human stakes of the migrant crisis and the intensity of the suffering it propagates. Aided by terrific performances, a script with contributions from first-hand migrant accounts and exceptional desert photography, this film lays bare the gruelling reality of an epic journey through Africa and across the Mediterranean.
2024 Academy Awards – Nominee – Best International Feature Film (Italian entry)