Was lucky to survive'
Migrant's brutal journey to Italy inspired Oscar-nominated film
Mamadou Kouassi's searing, epic journey over African deserts, through illegal prisons and across the Mediterranean Sea in a smugglers' boat informed Italian director Matteo Garrone's Oscar-nominated film Io Capitano.
Some episodes that the Ivorian migrant witnessed on his threeyear odyssey were too strong to make the final cut.
Garrone's film, which is nominated in the best international feature film category, traces the journey of two teenage boys who follow the migrant route from Senegal across the Niger desert to Libya, where they board a rusty smugglers' boat packed with migrants.
Smugglers force one of the teenagers to “captain” the boat, because as a minor he won't be jailed in Italy.
In the movie, no one dies on the perilous passage. But on Kouassi's boat, “people died. And I was lucky to survive.”
Kouassi, who completed his journey in 2008 and advised Garrone on the film, provided horrific details of torture that contribute to the film's powerful message, including prisoners being burned and beaten, as well as his experience as a slave labourer working as a mason on the desert villa of a wealthy Libyan.
More graphic episodes were cut, including repeated rapes of women by traffickers along the route, or scenes of migrants who can't provide family contacts for traffickers to extort being driven back to the desert and left to die.
Garrone's previous films include the 2008 organized crime drama Gomorrah, and the 2019 fantasy Pinocchio starring Roberto Benigni. The Italian director cast two Senegalese high school students, Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall, to play the teenage protagonists. In the film, the boys are lured to Europe by a dream of becoming singers fuelled by TikTok videos. In real life, the actors had little knowledge of the horrors of the migrant route before they began filming in their native Senegal.
Sarr and Fall's lives have been overturned by the sudden success of the film, and have been splitting their time since filming between Garrone's mother's beach house near Rome and touring cities promoting Io Capitano. Both nurture dreams of continuing in acting and Sarr hopes to become a soccer star.
The 40-year-old Kouassi, on the other hand, has continued his work as a cultural mediator in the city of Castel Volturno, near Naples, helping immigrants get work papers and health care.
His dream is that Io Capitano will influence migrant policy around the globe by focusing public attention on the often untold-horrors. For him, getting the message out is worth more than any industry award.
“To win, for example, the statute of the Oscar is important. But change is more important,” he said.