At the top of “Io Capitano” (“I Captain”), Matteo Garrone’s harrowing contender for greatest worldwide movie at subsequent month’s Academy Awards, a map tracks the journey taken by the movie’s two teenage protagonists: over 3,500 miles from Dakar, Senegal, to Sicily, by way of the scorching Nigerien desert, horrific Libyan prisons and a nerve-racking Mediterranean crossing aboard a rickety vessel.

Such perilous voyages, taken every year by numerous Africans searching for a brand new life in Europe, is “one of the great dramas of our times,” Garrone mentioned in a latest interview, and “Io Capitano” is framed as an epic, modern-day Odyssey, with protagonists no much less valiant than Homer’s hero.

“It’s a journey that’s an archetype so that anyone can identify with it,” mentioned Garrone, who’s greatest identified to worldwide audiences for the hyper-realistic 2008 drama “Gomorrah” and his darkish and fantastical “Pinocchio” (2019).

“Io Capitano” can be, he mentioned, a “document of contemporary history.” This month alone, over 2,000 individuals reached European shores by crossing the Mediterranean, whereas not less than 74 died, bringing the quantity of people that have gone lacking in that sea within the final decade to greater than 29,000, according to the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations company.

Many Europeans be taught of those landings, and deaths, from brief news segments, typically accompanied by clips of lawmakers pledging to cease unlawful migration. Garrone’s movie, which gained the Silver Lion for greatest directing finally yr’s Venice Film Festival, goes past the statistics with a plot based mostly on tales of actual individuals crossing the Mediterranean.

Garrone, who lives in Rome, mentioned he had been impressed to write down “Io Capitano” a number of years in the past after visiting a Sicilian center that assists minors and listening to the story of Fofana Amara, a person from Guinea who was solely 15 when — unable to swim and with no nautical expertise — traffickers in Libya compelled him to pilot a dilapidated ship carrying 250 individuals to the Sicilian port of Augusta.

As the vessel neared Sicily, Amara recalled, a helicopter handed overhead and he started screaming to get its consideration. After being rescued, he was arrested because the ship’s captain and spent two months in jail earlier than being launched, provided that he was a minor. He was given two years on parole.

Hearing Amara’s story, Garrone mentioned, he “immediately thought of Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Joseph Conrad.”

In the movie, Amara’s story is instructed by way of the character of Seydou, who leaves Senegal along with his cousin Moussa, pushed by youthful enthusiasm and the prospect of musical fame in Europe. After a collection of calamities and setbacks, Seydou is pressured to captain a ship of migrants throughout the tough Mediterranean, regardless of by no means having sailed earlier than.

In a latest interview, Amara mentioned he hoped the movie would assist viewers “understand what we go through.” It’s now been 10 years since Amara made his journey, and he mentioned it was painful to see such harmful, and infrequently deadly, crossings nonetheless being made, and nonetheless being met with normal indifference from the European public.

“People still come, people die, some make it, others don’t, some we don’t know their fate,” mentioned Amara, who later educated as a skipper at a nautical academy after which moved to Belgium, the place is ready for his asylum request to be evaluated.

To write the script, Garrone spoke to dozens of others who had additionally made the Mediterranean crossing, together with Mamadou Kouassi, whose story grew to become one other of the movie’s principal narrative sources. Nearly 20 years in the past, Kouassi left the Ivory Coast at age 19 and launched into a traumatic three-year odyssey by way of deserts, Libyan camps and a sea crossing during which three fellow passengers died.

“I call myself a survivor,” he mentioned in an interview.

Speaking to audiences whereas selling “Io Capitano,” Kouassi famous that folks had been moved to tears by the movie. “I say it’s not only my story, but the story of many people who undergo that tragedy to come to Europe,” he mentioned within the interview, including that some issues he had witnessed have been too grotesque to incorporate within the script.

Kouassi now works in a metropolis close to Naples as a cultural mediator, serving to newcomers from Africa and elsewhere navigate the ins and outs of a continent that’s typically unwelcoming to them.

“It is human to want to travel,” Kouassi mentioned. “People were made to move — no one can stop it. It’s like the sea: You can’t stop water from flowing.” That has explicit resonance in Africa, the continent that has the world’s youngest population, with 70 % of sub-Saharan Africa below the age of 30.

Garrone mentioned that he hadn’t got down to make a political movie, however that “Io Capitano” “inevitably became political” because it spoke to the idea that everybody ought to have the precise to “freely move, to discover, to experience new worlds.” It was vital for the director that the movie’s protagonists aren’t leaving house due to conflict, famine or local weather change, however as a substitute go within the hope of a greater future.

“Io Capitano” was shot in Senegal, Morocco and Sicily in 2022, and migrants labored on the crew and as extras, letting Garrone know after they felt the story didn’t ring true. “We know that cinema is a collective art form,” Garrone mentioned. “In this case it is even more, because we really made it together.”

The director saved the movie’s Senegalese lead actors, Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall, at the hours of darkness about their characters’ future. He shot chronologically, and so they weren’t given an advance script. “I wanted them to maintain a constant pressure without knowing whether or not they’d arrive in Italy,” he mentioned.

For the actors, who have been each youngsters throughout filming, it’s been a life-changing expertise.

Fall mentioned that whereas he hadn’t identified anybody who made the Mediterranean crossing, he very a lot felt the “responsibility to be the voice of those who don’t have one,” he mentioned. “It wasn’t easy.” Since capturing began, he has amassed over one million followers on TikTook, lots of whom gush over his sense of favor. “My dream is to see my own designs on the streets one day,” he added.

Sarr, who gained an award for greatest younger actor finally yr’s Venice Film Festival, mentioned that “Io Capitano” was “important for Africa, and for Senegal.” Although he hopes to proceed performing, he mentioned that, most of all, he wished to turn out to be an expert soccer participant.

Asked whether or not he hoped to pursue these desires in Europe, he instantly responded: “Oh, yes.”