ROME — Seydou Sarr’s magnetic eyes, black and luminous, look outward, but also inward. They point forward, but tend backward, like those of Tiresias, the blind soothsayer of ancient Greek myth. Sarr is an 18-year-old Senegalese actor, and plays the lead in Matteo Garrone’s film Me Captain (“Io Capitano”), which is vying for the Best International Film at next month’s Academy Awards.
Those remarkable eyes also suffered from a degenerative disease, the same disease that led to his mother’s blindness. He too was destined to lose his sight but then, after making the film, he came to Italy, had surgery and recovered.
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Sarr now lives with the Garrone and his family and dreams of continuing his acting career. In Me Captain, Sarr plays a Senegalese boy who leaves for Europe with a friend, Moussa (Moustapha Fall). Over the long time it takes to plan the trip, he never tells his mother, who had forbidden him to leave by telling him, “You have to breathe the same air I breathe,” in an attempt to protect him from danger and shield herself from his loss.
But Seydou secretly leaves, and ends up getting lost: first in the desert, then in Libyan detention centers, until he accepts a trafficker’s offer to drive a fishing boat loaded with people from the coast of Libya to Italy, only to find himself lost again, adrift in the middle of a storm.
The final scene from which the film’s title is taken is a tight shot of the boy’s eyes, swelling with tears, as an Italian Coast Guard helicopter flies over the fishing boat.
Italy remains a contour of land, a shadow, as a few miles from the destination the boy cries out over and over, “Me captain…” with both desperation and relief, and in saying “me” has become a man taking responsibility for the safety of the boat’s other passengers.
When a film chooses its director
“I began with an image, the one that later became the final scene of the movie. I always start from an image in my films,” says Matteo Garrone, 54, winner of the special jury prize at Cannes in 2008 with Gomorrah and in 2012 with Reality, sitting in his small Roman studio on a sultry late August afternoon.
I was full of doubts, I was afraid of it becoming rhetorical.
The plot of the movie begins several years ago: a friend of the director, who runs a reception center in Sicily, had told him about the story of an underage boy, Fofana Amara, who had brought hundreds of people to safety on a boat that had left Libya, but once in Italy was charged with aiding and abetting illegal immigration and ended up in jail for six months. A crime for which one faces up to 30 years in Italy today.
“I was struck by the story of this boy, I imagined him as I later showed him in the final scene of the film.” Getting to shoot it, however, took Garrone years: “I was full of doubts, I was afraid of it becoming rhetorical, or that my viewpoint might be inadequate to tell this story, that it might seem like an attempt to speculate on the suffering of others,” he explained. “Instead, at a certain point I felt that the film was mature, it was as if it had chosen me.”
Writing the screenplay took six months, but the preparation was far longer. It took more than two years to put together the documentation with which Garrone reconstructed the main route traveled by thousands of people from West Africa to Europe, through photographic material, but above all by meeting dozens of people who actually made the journey over the past few decades.
The movie’s final scene surprised the director, as it did the rest of the cast and crew: “Seydou managed to show the whole journey: He’s laughing, he’s crying, he’s surprised, he’s in disbelief. All the moods go through the boy’s eyes at that moment,” Garrone explains. “That’s what cinema is for me: to create unique moments. I had that feeling, that something happened in that moment that was beyond me.”
An epic journey into adulthood
Films about immigration can fail for a variety of reasons: they can be patronizing, inauthentic, too didactic. The risk is to get trapped inside some kind of rhetoric or to portray people as a caricature — or even to use them as a mirror. Matteo Garrone has not succumb to any of these temptations, and has succeeded in making an almost impossible film: telling a very current story — a topic we see almost daily in the media — and transfigure it into an archetype.
Me Captain is the epic journey of two boys, a fable about the transition to adulthood and the traumatic encounter with separation from your roots and loved ones, the danger of losing oneself — and death itself.
“I was interested in making a film that was partly epic, but at the same time was a road movie and also a coming-of-age story,” Garrone says. “I was thinking about the Odyssey, but also Pinocchio; about Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”
Senegal is a bright, full of color and affection. As they depart, the two boys lose everything and themselves.
“I felt there was a lack of storytelling in visual form of the journey, especially the part of the journey that takes place on the other side of the sea. I wanted to make a counterpoint, to reverse the perspective, to look at what happens before,” he adds.
No extreme poverty, no war, no desperation drive the two Senegalese “Huckleberry Finn” figures to leave. It is only their audacity that makes them underestimate the dangers and overestimate themselves. But also the desire to be more like their dreams, a certain idea of themselves, the result of reveries and projections.
Senegal, their home, is depicted in the film as a bright point of origin, full of color and affection. It is a fullness that launches their journey, which slowly fades as the two protagonists move away from it. As they leave their native land, the two boys lose everything and lose themselves, betray their affections and risk death. But it is an irrational and necessary choice for them, a game and at once a challenge to themselves.
Authenticity at all costs
“For me the important thing in this movie is that it has to be believable, that every scene has to be authentic,” the director says. “That was the main challenge. I put my own experience and my own view into the service of their stories. I wanted those who went through that experience to recognize a truth in the film.”
The film is inspired by the true stories of four people who made the journey at different times in history, “Every bit of the film is linked to the story of something that really happened.” One of the most difficult scenes during filming — between Senegal, Morocco and Italy — was when the boys are forced by Libyans to take a laxative while in the desert.
“There was a sandstorm, and the scene was almost risking becoming comical. It was one of the film’s crisis moments,” Garrone says.
Wolof, the native language
The filmmaker decided the film would be in Wolof, the native language of 40% of Senegalese, although he does not speak it. “I got help from the actors, but the truth is that I was going by ear, hearing a language that was incomprehensible to me,” Garrone recalled. “But I felt like I understood when the actors were in and when they were out of character. The great thing about their interpretation is that it is very instinctive, they were living those emotions live.”
I could hear the voices of those women.
For Seydou Sarr, speaking a few days before the September screening at Venice film festival, the role felt like a personal responsibility. “I could hear the voices of those women, those people, those children,” he said.
Sarr personally said that he never really thought about leaving home, even though he dreamed of Europe. “Those who leave know the dangers they face. But everything is much worse than one imagines.”
Starting from reality
Italian literature and cinema are increasingly returning to a noble tradition of portraying harsh reality, an inspiration for Garrone, who especially loves the work of legendary director Roberto Rossellini. But for the Roman director, reality has always been the starting point, transforming it with the poetic register of the fairy tale. Garrone was already interested in immigration when he made his two early films Terra di mezzo (“Middle-earth”, 1996) and Ospiti (“Guests”, 1998).
“My first full-length film recounts the everyday life of Nigerian prostitutes in the Roman countryside,” he recalled. “I was not fully aware of it at the time, but I was interested in the element of meta-reality, of abstraction that the bodies of these women brought to our everyday life.”
Ospiti is Garrone’s only autobiographical film and again stars a foreign couple: two Albanian boys who do odd jobs and are housed in the home of a Roman photographer, named Corrado. In reality, the two boys have really been guests of the director for quite some time. Me Captain is the “closing of a circle” that began with his first feature, the director explains. “It reminds me that in cinema, I always have to take risks.”
