Matteo Garrone on his migration drama: ‘I could only rely on the sound of their voices to tell if they were acting well’
Italian director Matteo Garrone is a reliable crusher of hopes and aspirations. In his 2008 breakthrough crime drama Gomorrah,two fresh-faced Neapolitan youngsters aspire to emulate the mobsters they’ve seen portrayed in American gangster movies: they end up being shot by a bunch of pot-bellied mafia grandpas in flip-flops, and carted off by a digger.
Garrone’s 2019 retelling of Pinocchio had the titular wooden boy join a caravan of children headed for a mythical Land of Toys – only to be transformed into a donkey, crippled in a circus show, and thrown into the sea. Wide-eyed boys who dare to dream ending up as landfill is such a persistent theme in the 54-year-old Roman filmmaker’s works, it’s probably quite useful that the two teenage protagonists of his most recent project weren’t familiar with his back catalogue before they signed up.
But then Io Capitano (Me, Captain), which will compete for the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice international film festival, is a departure in more ways than one. Telling the story of Senegalese teenagers Seydou and Moussa’s odyssey from their Dakar homes to the shores of Europe, it is the first film in which Garrone doesn’t explore Italy from within but through the eyes of those who make it their destination in the hope of a better life.
“I tried to change the point of view,” he says, speaking on video call from Rome. “It’s a reverse shot of what we are used to seeing. We are used to having the camera in Europe, watching people arriving over the sea, sometimes alive, sometimes dead. I wanted to show the part we should know about but don’t.”
Since the number of first-time asylum seekers in the European Union surged above the 1 million mark in 2015, the stories of the people who have crossed the Mediterranean on boats have been told in numerous documentaries but fewer feature films than one might have expected.
Director Simon Verhoeven’s 2016 film Willkommen bei den Hartmanns (Welcome to the Hartmanns’) got some comic mileage out of German awkwardness, but left the Nigerian refugee newcomer in their midst as little more than plot device. In A Bigger Splash, by Garrone’s compatriot Luca Guadagnino and released that same year, the people whose boats land on Sicily’s beaches