Io Capitano review: A swashbuckling, award-winning portrayal of the European migrant crisis

Arriving not long after Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border and Anthony Chen’s Drift, Matteo Garrone’s Io Capitano is the most swashbuckling of the current wave of dramas depicting the European migrant crisis. Working from a script composed of real-life testimonies and dramatised with youthful verve and extravagant flights of fancy, the director’s follow-up to the exquisite Pinocchio is a true adventure.

Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall), a pair of spirited Senegalese teenage cousins, leave their hometown and set out for Italy, where Seydou hopes to find fame and fortune as a musician. They are cautioned that the EU is not the paradise they know from TikTok and the Champions League, but they save up and sneak off regardless.

Homeric beats define their journey. The Malian border police who challenge the boys’ forged passports and various traffickers occupy Laestrygonian-shaped spaces. They are the first of many profiteers and predators across a blackhearted economy. A terrifying desert trek imperils the sympathetic Seydou as he tends to an exhausted woman. There is worse to come in Libya, where rebels frisk new arrivals for valuables and where torture and extortion await at a mafia-run prison. The nerve-racking final leg of their journey requires Seydou to “captain” an overcrowded boat across the Mediterranean to Sicily.

[ Io Capitano: Chronicling the perilous migrant trek from Senegal to Europe with Homeric flair ]

Violence and other attendant horrors are cleverly obscured, and any worldly dangers are countered by Seydou’s exuberant sense of hope and by acts of kindness. A fellow inmate named Martin (Issaka Sawagodo) takes Seydou on as a bricklayer, allowing the teen safe passage to Tripoli. A network of migrants around that city provides further assistance. The charismatic Sarr rightly took home the Marcello Mastroianni Award from Venice International Film Festival last year. Paolo Carnera’s camera maximises colour and light.