(my own translation from Italian)
Italian director Matteo Garrone made a beautiful film, totally based on true facts; the film was awarded the Silver Lion at the 80th Venice Film Festival.
Me Captain tells the exodus from Senegal to Sicily of an underage boy along the ordeal of the desert crossed on broken-down trucks and on foot for days, at the mercy of criminal smugglers, of the Libyan mafia, risking imprisonment for no fault, armed robberies, beatings and torture. That is all the migrants must suffer along the way, up to the desperate crossing of the sea, aboard dilapidated boats, crowded to the limits of survival.
The boy, precisely because he is a minor, is hired to steer the boat across the stretch of sea that reaches Sicily from Tripoli, Lybia. A minor is not punishable in Italy. In short, he receives instructions on how to run the ship that the traffickers entrust to him. With great effort and an absolute sense of responsibility towards the human lives he is carrying, he will complete his daring mission with honour, becoming a true hero in his own way. It often happens that a minor is placed at the helm of these clandestine boats. The story of the film is actually the true story of Fofana Amara, a teenager from Guinea, who was 15 when he was entrusted with a boat with 250 people on board.
As the director said to the audience when presenting the film in Turin, migration from Africa is the contemporary epic. Everything we see in the film, every action, every fact, every frame is based on reality, it precisely tells true facts. Matteo Garrone made this film to denounce the violation of basic human rights, the terrifying injustice that these people suffer, to the point of becoming slaves: captured in Libya, sold, put to work hard without the slightest pay, in exchange for the chance to survive and just some sort of bed and some food, eventually redeemed to find freedom subject to further exploitation and violence. It's an adventurous film, very well made, moving, but it doesn't leave room for pietism. It shows us the viewpoint of those who make this hallucinating journey, in this case through Mali, Niger, Libya and the Mediterranean Sea, up to Europe. (More such journeys take a different and even more dangerous route: as a matter of fact, there is another route which goes from Senegal up the Atlantic Ocean to the Canary Islands, leaving a higher number of corpses at the bottom of the perilous ocean.) Matteo Garrone alleviates the most dramatic moments of the narrative with the expedient of the fairy tale: beautiful dream visions appear to help the protagonist elaborate the distressing events. The exhausted woman in the desert, as if by magic, flies over the immense territories led by the hand of the kid who was unable to help her; an angelic figure flies through the night to reach the protagonist's mother in her sleep with reassuring news about her son.
The protagonist is eighteen-year-old actor Seydou Sarr, he was awarded the 'Marcello Mastroianni' award for young debuting actors at Venice Film Festival. Moustapha Fall co-stars, in the role of cousin Moussa, who leaves Senegal with him. There are many lyrical moments in the film. One of these is the astonished approach by sea to an alien oil platform in the Mediterranean, a steel structure that totally eludes the understanding of sailors, apparently an illusion of land!, then vanished in the darkness of the night. In the first part, the director tells us about life in Dakar, the beautiful socialness, the traditional ceremonies, strong family affections, humble work, committed workers. He shows these migrants-to-be as persons, as people who will soon clash against a wall of racist prejudices, which will take their fundamental dignity away. The film begins emblematically with an awakening: the boy wakes up one morning at home to the happy noise of his little sisters playing. It is the metaphorical prologue of the awakening to the world that is about to begin, the transition to adulthood, which will be an odyssey. The enormous suffering that will come is poorly understood and underestimated. A veteran from Europe warns them about the risk of death and extreme horror during the journey and also upon arrival at the destination: he is not listened to.
For the record, Fofana, the real life kid who made this journey in 2014, made it to Italy, was immediately arrested and accused of being a smuggler, spent a few days in a prison (for adults!), then the judge understood that he was a victim of human trafficking and that he had run the boat as a way of escaping blackmail and he was not a mastermind of this cruel trafficking. He was welcomed into a immigrant community in Catania, Sicily and underwent two years of evaluation from local social services. He attended school and graduated, he currently lives in Belgium and, after nine years, is still trying to complete the paperwork for the right to reside and work. Me Captain is a powerful film, shot with great intelligence and humanity, it is not to be missed.
The film is presented at a series of international film festivals (Venice, San Sebastián, Los Angeles, Israel, Turkey, Netherlands, Greece, Sweden, Taiwan) and will be released in 2024 in theatres in Spain, Italy, Portugal and we hope it will be made visible in many other countries.
director Matteo Garrone and his two actors Seyou Sarr (left in the picture) and Moustapha Fall
The two teenagers on the first bus, soon after leaving Dakar, at the start of a journey to discover the world, hoping to prove themselves in the face of the world's challenges, hoping to unleash their potential, just as every young person should be allowed to do
walking for days in the desert with no shelter whatsoever
one of the many beautiful scenes
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