‘Io Capitano’ Review: A Gritty, Heartbreaking Study of Migrant Dreams From Italy’s Matteo Garrone – Venice Film Festival
deadline.comEven if the critical reactions have been mixed, Italian films have proven much stronger than usual at this year’s Venice Film Festival, with a notable resurgence of genre filmmaking in the likes of Adagio and Enea.
Ironically, Matteo Garrone, the one local director in the selection whose actual stock in trade is genre of all stripes — gangster realism (Gomorrah, Dogman), satirical comedy (Reality), and baroque fantasy (Tale of Tales) — arrived this year with a blisteringly topical drama that might be his most traditional, and best, yet.
Migrant dreams are a hot topic this year, and Garrone’s Io Capitano (literally “Me Captain”) follows hard on the heels of Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border, which covers the same topic from a different angle: where Holland’s film deals with the experience of immigrants as they arrive in Europe, Garrone’s film fills in some of that backstory, showing the punishing process of illegal migration from the point of view of two Senegalese teenagers, Seydou (Seydou Starr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall).
Seydou lives with his widowed mother and little sisters in Dakar. They are poor and live cramped together under the roof of a tiny, ramshackle house, but family life is happy.
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