Io Capitano

A nominee for Best International Film at this year’s Academy Awards, the latest from the director of Gomorrah and Dogman is the powerful odyssey of a young man from Senegal, Seydou, who sets out from Dakar for Europe in the company of his cousin Moussa. Their journey will take them through Mali and Niger — with fake passports and at the mercy of people smugglers — into the Sahara, and, they hope, to Libya and the Mediterranean. The dream is Europe. The reality is punishing in the extreme.

At a time when economic migrants are a political hot potato throughout the western world, Matteo Garrone has made a humane and empathetic movie about the terrible plight of those who brave these desperate journeys. The film is often harrowing but always filled with the heart and hopes of his two teenage protagonists, mirrored in the pulsing North African score and brief but transcendent moments of magical realism.

Garrone invites you into a story and demands your attention with visual clarity and narrative urgency. Yet his great strength here is the tenderness of his touch, which works as a kind of force field that keeps your own despair at bay and your sympathies on his complicated, transparent, achingly hopeful characters.

Manohla Dargis, New York Times

Garrone’s film has a three-dimensional and devastatingly realized human soul at its core. The world could do with paying attention to Seydou’s story and the millions of other real ones like it.

Leila Latiff, Indiewire