Io Capitano

Matteo Garrone's Io Capitano won the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice 2023 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2024. The film consolidated Garrone, after Gomorrah (2008) and Pinocchio (2019), as one of the most internationally significant Italian directors of his generation. Working in Wolof and French alongside Italian, Garrone made the film with substantial input from real migrants whose journeys had partly inspired the screenplay.

Two Senegalese teenage cousins (Seydou (Seydou Sarr, in a remarkable debut performance that won the Marcello Mastroianni Award at Venice for best emerging actor) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall)) leave Dakar against their families' wishes, in pursuit of the European life their friends and the broader cultural moment have promised them. The film follows the long migration north, across the Sahara desert by truck convoy, through Libyan detention and the trafficking economy that operates around the Mediterranean coast, onto a boat that one of them is eventually forced to pilot across the central Mediterranean.

Paolo Carnera's photography of the Sahara, the Libyan industrial-detention exteriors, and the Mediterranean sequences produced one of the most distinctive recent landscape registers in Italian cinema. The film became one of the most-discussed European cinema works of its year on the continent's continuing migration crisis; its commitment to centring the migrant subject's perspective rather than the European-receiving political response made it widely consequential as a piece of contemporary political cinema.