‘As you get on the boat, they say: Off you go to die!’ – true horrors of a migrant ‘Marvel movie’
Like fathers of teenagers everywhere, Matteo Garrone worries. He worries when his 15-year-old son leaves their home in Rome for a night out in town: “sometimes it can be dangerous,” says Garrone, the 55-year-old Italian director best known for his brutal 2008 mafia drama Gomorrah. “There are gangs of young people who come in from the suburbs to fight”. And he worries about drugs: “My son smokes a lot of weed and I’m worried that from weed he’ll jump to something else,” he sighs. “We parents do worry.”
Yet, his latest film puts those anxieties firmly into perspective. Visually stunning and emotionally intense, the Oscar-nominated Io Capitano tells the tale of two Senegalese cousins who, at the same age as Garrone’s son, give their hard-earned savings to people traffickers and embark on a naive quest to find fame and fortune in Italy. A short way into their epic journey, the sweet boys (played by newcomers Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall) are thrown from a truck in the middle of the desert. To survive, they must pass the corrupt Libyan border police, try to make money by working for criminal construction companies and finally attempt to cross the Mediterranean on an overcrowded rust bucket of a boat.
Speaking over tea in a London hotel, Garrone says it was important to him that the film was “not about migrants fleeing war and starvation, but about kids who – like our own kids – just want the right to discover the world, the opportunity to make the best life”. Like Gomorrah – about young men drawn into the ruthless world of Naples’ street gangs – and even his last film, 2019’s dark reimagining of Pinocchio, Io Capitano is about the dangerous dreams of boys.
“Seydou and Moustapha’s characters lie to their families about their plans, just as Pinocchio lies to Geppetto because he wants to go to a land of toys,” says Garrone. “And for so many young Africans, looking at social media, Europe can also look like a land of toys. They see young Europeans coming to their world on holiday and they don’t see why they shouldn’t be allowed the same freedom to travel”.
Sitting alongside Garrone is 30-year-old Mamadou Kouassi, who inspired the film and was present on set throughout the shoot. Kouassi tells me how, as a football-mad 15-year-old, he left his family in Ivory Coast to pursue a dream of playing professionally in Europe. “I was a good striker,” he says. But his hopes began to evaporate the moment he was dropped in the Sahara desert. “You are just told to walk,” he says. “Most of the time we youth in Africa don’t even think that it is dangerous to cross the desert and when you start the journey you don’t mind. But the further you go, the more impossible it becomes to go back and that is where you will face all the tragedy. People fall; you see dead bodies, many dead bodies on the sand.” Kouassi closes his eyes. “You can walk for kilometres with your eyes closed because what you see is too heavy. That’s when you ask yourself: why did I make this decision? But it’s late, too late. You have to keep walking…” He falls silent and shakes his head.
Although the desert was bad enough, Kouassi tells me that “the illegal jails in Libya” where he was incarcerated after being intercepted in the desert were “worse”. Garrone explains that police on the Libyan border “treat migrants like bankomats. They put them in prison and make them call home for money to pay for release.”
Kouassi continues: “If you are lucky enough to have parents or friends to pay the money they let you go – but then another group catches you and takes you to another jail. You don’t ‘live’ in those jails, you just survive, day by day. You keep one eye open in the night because they come to your room to beat people and to shoot people. Sometimes the guards take prisoners in a lorry to the desert and leave them there to die. You feel stupid, ashamed and so sorry for your parents sending money.”
After three years, he finally escaped this hell on to a boat on the Mediterranean which “did not have an engine strong enough for the many people. The last thing [the traffickers] say as you get on to the boat is: ‘Off you go to die!’” Kouassi recalls throwing a rope to some of the passengers who fell into the water – “none of us could swim” – and then describes his horror as the boat split apart on the waves. “Somebody grabbed me to keep me on the boat. There was so much screaming… and then silence”.
Fishermen spotted the boat and alerted the coastguard who transported Kouassi and his fellow passengers to the island of Lampedusa. “It’s a relief to be rescued, you know many people have drowned in the sea and their families never know what happened. But then you’re back in prison again.” Arrival in Europe “is another challenge you must face. I heard today of a boy who was being sent back and he took a rope and hanged himself”. For those who make the treacherous journey only to be sent back to Africa, he says, “there is a stigma to failing: your parents may have sold their house to pay for your journey. You were the hope of your family.”
“In Europe people talk about African migrants in terms of numbers,” says Garrone. “They talk about stopping ‘the boats’ instead of ‘men, women and children’. The political language is dehumanising. I wanted to make a film to encourage empathy and rehumanise the story.”
But he also hopes it will serve as a warning to those teenagers in Africa who are thinking of making the journey to Europe. He and Kouassi have been taking the film – which earned Garrone the Silver Lion award at Venice Film Festival – on a tour of Africa. “I hope the young people will see the dangers,” says Kouassi. “I want to take it to Ivory Coast where my father is still alive along with my sisters. I prefer they stay there; it is better they stay. Europe is not what we see on our phones and it is important we make people understand. Maybe come for a trip, for studies, if you have a job lined up. That is another thing. But not this way: I have a duty to explain to people this desert is not the way to travel.”
Garrone shrugs. “I don’t think we will stop people wanting to travel. Young people will still take risks. I am not so optimistic as Mamadou. But maybe they will be better informed.”
One of the film’s characters ends up being forced to captain the boat across the Mediterranean, despite a total lack of experience. Garrone explains that this is a common method used by the traffickers to dodge law enforcement and ensure their own safety. Garrone interviewed a teenager who’d been given this dreadful responsibility, then arrested on his arrival in Europe. “That boy was lucky. He was given six months in prison. Now the law is much harder – the sentence is 10-15 years, even though these people are also victims.”
Garrone explains that he deliberately left out of the film some of the more brutal experiences of migrants – including the sexual assault of women and girls – to ensure that it could be screened to children in an educational context. “Io Capitano has been shown in schools across Italy and now schools are showing it in France. I hope the same can happen in England,” he says. “Young people might assume this is a boring story, a painful story. Then they realise it’s about heroes fighting injustice, battling through a dark page in contemporary history.” He nestles his cup neatly back into his saucer, grins at Kouassi and then at me. “It’s a real-life Marvel movie.”
Io Capitano is in cinemas from April 5
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