Io Capitano

Last night I went to the Broadway to see Io Capitano, which was nominated for the Best International Feature Academy Award and won the Silver Lion for director Matteo Garrone at the Venice Film Festival, and I was incredibly moved by this powerful story of migration.  Two Senegalese teens, Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and his cousin Moussa (Moustapha Fall), secretly work construction jobs for six months to earn enough money to emigrate to Europe for a better life. Seydou begins having second thoughts about the dangers involved but Moussa convinces him and they leave without telling their families.  They pay an exorbitant price to be taken across the Sahara Desert during a harrowing journey with a group on foot but they are separated when Moussa is arrested and Seydou ends up in a detention camp in Libya.  Seydou survives the horrors of the detention camp and being sold into indentured servitude with the help of a fellow detainee named Martin (Issaka Sawagodo) who takes him under his wing but he refuses to continue on to Italy with him in order to stay and search for Moussa in Tripoli.  He eventually finds Moussa only to discover that he was shot while escaping from prison.  Desperate to get Moussa to Italy for medical care, Seydou takes the only option available to him which is to pilot a boat, overcrowded with desperate woman and children for whom he feels responsible, in a daring journey across the Mediterranean Sea.  It was sometimes very difficult to watch everything that Seydou and Moussa go through but, even though there are lots of people who ruthlessly take advantage of their situation, there are just as many people who show them kindness and I loved the use of magical realism as a way of coping with the horrors they are experiencing.  Both Sarr and Fall give highly sympathetic and compelling performances but I was especially invested in Seydou's fate because we see everything through his eyes and he humanizes a global problem.  The suspense is almost unbearable in the third act because of how much I had come to care for these characters but I loved the ending because it is cautiously optimistic without minimizing the dangers they still face.  I loved this and would highly recommend it.