Io Capitano

From Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah, Dogman, Tale of Tales) comes this searing tale of two young boys’ migration from Africa to Europe. Nominated for Best International Feature at the upcoming Academy Awards, it’s an odyssey traversing city, desert and ocean, from West Africa to the Mediterranean Sea.

Two Senegalese teenagers, Seydou (the captivating, award-winning Seydou Sarr, who also contributed several songs to the film’s soundtrack) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall) 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 shock 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 Sarr’s terrific performance in particular, and a script with contributions from first-hand migrant accounts.