Oscar-nominated film inspired by brutal journey
CASTEL VOLTURNO, ITALY >> 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 Oscarnominated film “Io Capitano.” Some episodes that the Ivorian migrant witnessed on his three-year 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 laborer 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.
“Matteo removed it because we want the film to reach a wide audience,'' Kouassi explained.
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. Sarr won the Marcello Mastroianni prize for best emerging actor at the Venice Film Festival, where the film premiered.
In the film, the boys are lured to Europe by a dream of becoming singers fueled 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.