Homer’s Odyssey gave the epic its itinerant template, and there is an Homeric quality in Io Capitano that cuts across national and racial boundaries. At the beginning of the film, cousins Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall) are two carefree teenagers determined to leave their Senegalese village for the promise of a better life in Europe. The director, Matteo Garrone, has always been interested in telling stories of boys and young men whose innocence is ravaged by the cutthroat environments in which they grow up. He likens Io Capitano, which contains some gruesome scenes of Seydou being tortured by the Libyan Mafia, to both his 2008 Italian crime film, Gomorrah, adapted from Roberto Saviano’s Mafia tell-all of the same name, and his 2019 film Pinocchio, which hewed closely to Carlo Collodi’s surprisingly gritty 1883 source novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio. Io Capitano, which won the Silver Lion for best director at last year’s Venice Film Festival and has been nominated for an Academy Award, took Garrone eight years to make and is now in U.S. theaters. —Tobias Grey