Film review | ‘Io Capitano’ — Dreaming of a Better Life, with Nightmares in Store

One of the finest films at this year’s Santa Barbara International Film Festival — if not the finest, period — Matteo Garrone’s powerful refugee saga Io Capitano (headed to the Riviera for a week’s run — don’t miss it) can be boiled down to an elemental plot summation. But its true depths transcend any simple plot summary. Two hopeful young Senegalese men dream of escaping their impoverished lives in their village and brave the perilous road north to Tripoli and then crossing the Mediterranean to Sicily and, presumably, a European dream.

What makes Io Capitano such a captivating piece of cinema, a film with an ingrained but never ham-fisted socio-political agenda, is Garrone’s fierce quest for both authenticity and an engaging filmic atmosphere. Creating a script in collusion with Mamadou, who personally endured the story we’re watching, Garrone rightly opens the story in the Senegalese village, with its infectious vibrancy of culture, musical pulsations, unabashed color, implied aromas and the complex emotional textures involved.

The opening is key to a central concern and goal of the film, to actually tell the tale of a refugee’s flight from the inside and starting with their source, in this case, not a war-torn or oppressive zone but one lined with economic struggles and limited futures for our young dreamers. The tight focus on the refugees’ lives and backgrounds contrasts a more common detached portrayal in the media, through which refugees are dehumanized and viewed as faceless victims and statistical props.

Garrone has proven his artistic mettle in terms of dealing with gritty realism — and the beating hearts of real-life characters and situations — in ways both visceral and underscored by compassionate humanity. His breakout 2008 film Gomorra (a hit of that year’s SBIFF) grabs us by the senses and the sternum in its depiction of violence and wheels of vengeance with the young gangster anti-heroes in an Italian crime syndicate.

In Io Capitano, the heartless purveyors of violence are in no way protagonists, but opportunistic bad actors exploiting the vulnerability and meager finances along the refugees path. One grisly scene in a bogus “prison” is particularly hellish, while the Sahara crossing scene embodies the concept of a long-suffering desert trek. But the Homeric path is also lined with acts of kindness and optimism in the face of daunting challenges and occasionally abject adversity.

Horrors notwithstanding, Io Capitano brims with a tenacious sense of hope in its bedraggled and sometimes brutalized characters. A final, lingering shot of our hero, deputized as the captain of a rickety Mediterranean ship packed with refugees, is one of the most memorable shots in all of 2023 cinema.

At the SBIFF screening a fascinating post-screening Q&A lent added veracity to the story thanks to the presence of Garrone, his two lead actors (Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall), and also the man whose story is distilled on the screen.

Fall gave an impassioned commentary, with an almost sermon-like fervor: “Life is a risk, like a jungle … this film is also like a doc, because it is reality for so many people. Every single person has a right to dream. This movie will help the world see this reality.” Io Capitano, nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar and with an expanding public appeal internationally, is well on its way to spreading the gospel about that reality. Garrone’s multi-faceted film is a potent reality check on a world where inequities are rampant: It is also an example of the unique power of cinema to tell stories and lure us into untold worlds of being, and dreaming.