Homer’s Odyssey gave the epic its itinerant template, and there is an undeniably Homeric quality to Io Capitano that cuts across national and racial boundaries. Since the film was released in Italy, last September, its Italian director, Matteo Garrone, has helped to arrange numerous screenings for the country’s schoolchildren. “A young audience … goes to see this kind of movie thinking they will go to sleep because it’s about migrants,” Garrone tells me. “But then they discover—I know this because I met hundreds and hundreds of students—that there are two kids like them with the same desires, the same dreams, and … family that is worried for them.”
At the beginning of Io Capitano, now in theaters in the U.S., 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. Indeed, it’s hard to square their joyous lives in Senegal, epitomized by their attendance of a sabar (a dance party for Senegalese teenage girls), with the hellish journey that they embark upon.
