The film tells of two young people, Seydou and Moussa, who leave Dakar to reach Europe. Their contemporary odyssey takes them through the horrors of Libyan detention centers and the dangers of the sea.
For Matteo Garrone it was important to address this topic.
“For years, decades, we have seen boats arriving in the Mediterranean. Sometimes they save the people on board, sometimes they don't,” said the filmmaker, quoted by Africanews.
“There is the ritual of counting the living and the dead. Over time, we get used to imagining these people as numbers and losing sight of the fact that there is a world behind it, desires.”
“And the idea, in fact, is to place the camera on the other side, that is, Africa. Pointing it from Africa to Europe, trying to give visual form to that entire part of the journey that someone knows, someone doesn't know, but that normally doesn't have a visual form in the West, that is, the entire part linked to the trip through Africa, the desert, the detention camps in Libya and then the first part of the journey at sea”, adds Matteo Garrone.
The film “Io Capitano”, lasting 2 hours and 1 minute, is inspired by the real-life story of Mamadou Kouassi, who also collaborated on the script and shared with the director the story of his dangerous journey to Italy, when he was just 20 years old.
“During the trip we met people who said: 'This is not child's play. We don't recommend doing this because we've seen people die.' We spent days thinking about it and then decided to take this trip. So, this trip is really being told, first of all, how I lived it”, he highlighted.
