The statistics about the deadly nature of the migrant journey from Africa to Europe are grim. 3,000 people died trying to cross the Mediterranean in 2023 alone (Guardian 15 February 2024).  Countless others have died on the trek across the Sahara to the Libyan coast. The governments of different European countries are united in their efforts to close the gates. Italy’s “post”-fascist prime minister Giorgia Meloni is attempting to induce the government of Albania to set up “transit camps” for would-be migrants to Italy. Tunisia is being paid to steer dark-skinned migrants back to sub-Saharan Africa. The migrants who arrive safely in Italy may face long-term confinement and are frequently forced to take jobs paying as little as ten euros a day, if they find work at all.  The lives of people fleeing from the effects of imperialism and climate change—hunger, war, poverty, super-exploitation—are, from the standpoint of the world’s ruling classes, worth next to nothing.|

The capitalist nightmare of migration makes  it on to the silver screen
It is the great virtue of Matteo Garrone’s “Io Capitano ''—celebrated at the Venice Film Festival and nominated for the International Feature Film category of this year’s Oscar awards—that these statistics take on faces and names.  From a left political standpoint, the film invites critique.  But this account of two Senegalese teenagers making their way across Niger and the Saharan desert in search of better lives is very harsh—and very moving. The two principal characters, Seydou and Moussa, are played by young men (Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall) with no previous acting experience; they speak in Wolof, a Senegalese language, which requires the audience to understand them through subtitles. They are warned that their planned journey is laden with corpses. But they nonetheless seek the blessing of their ancestors and embark on an “adventure” (as they view it) that soon turns into a nightmare. They are robbed by bandits and witness the deaths of fellow-travelers abandoned in the desert. 

In Libya they are imprisoned in foul conditions and witness torture by fire and amputation; Seydou is enslaved as a construction laborer. When they finally make their way to the shore, they are allowed passage on a drastically overcrowded, rusty boat on the condition that Seydou—who has never seen the sea before--function as captain.  (Since he is not an adult, he cannot be arrested, and the boat’s owners cannot be charged with criminal trafficking.) The film’s last shots show the Italian coast looming into view. Seydou—who has been proudly proclaiming, “Io capitano!” (“I am the captain!”)—has a worried look on his handsome young face. 

“Io Capitano” is hardly conceived from a politically radical standpoint.  It is based upon Garrone’s extensive consultation with an Ivorian migrant, Mamadou Kouassi, whose three-year-long journey to Italy was still more violent and tragic.  

Many rapes occurred in the Libyan prison; kidnapped people unable to pay ransom were driven back to the desert to die; others died in the Mediterranean; upon arriving in Italy Kouassi spent years laboring for near-slave wages in the fields of Catania. Garrone deliberately “removed [such events] because we want the film to reach a wide audience,” explained Kouassi (“Migrant’s 3 brutal years trying to reach Italy inspired the Oscar-nominated film ‘Io Capitano,’” AP 16 February 2024). 

Arguably, however, the cost of shielding the audience from the full brutality of Kouassi’s experience is to deprive them of knowledge they need to have. The film’s extraordinary panoramic camera shots of both the desert and the sea are set against the suffering of the people who traverse them: for the viewer, does this beauty supply relief from pain?  There are a few mystical moments (as when a woman who has died of thirst in Seydou’s arms is magically elevated and flies back home) that soften the hard-hitting realism.

By focusing on the protagonist’s journey from naivete to knowledge, the film adheres to the familiar “coming-of-age” plot, suggesting that the phrase “Io capitano” affirms Seydou’s hard-won attainment of manhood. Finally, the film’s lack of explicit confrontation with the root causes of migration in imperialist domination of West Africa—welcomed by many critics as signals of its humanist universalism—enables the viewer to empathize emotionally with the characters on a personal level without fully coming to terms with the reasons for their imperiled situation. 

Bosses’ film hides the true cause of mass displacement
But the film also invites an ironic interpretation that weakens some of these criticisms. The startling beauty of the landscape reminds us that the ugliness of the world is social, not natural. The rare moments of surreal mysticism testify to Seydou’s intense need for quasi-religious consolation for his suffering.  Above all, the film’s title—“I am the captain!”--suggests that we humans are anything but the captains of our own fates: Seydou’s troubled look as he approaches the forbidding Italian coastline hardly indicates that a bright future awaits him.
 
“Io Capitano '' illustrates the capacity of most commercial films to pitch to different levels of political understanding, from humanistic liberalism to radical antiracism. This ideological flexibility is inherent in the nature of popular cinema production under capitalism (Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice, 131-33). 

Nonetheless, Garrone’s powerful film testifies to the urgency of the current historical moment, when the crisis of mass migration—like the current war on Gaza—is stripping away any veils legitimizing imperialist racism. Communists are urged to see this film with their friends and discuss how it illustrates the need for a very different world—one in which true universalism is made possible by the abolition of capitalism and the creation of egalitarian communism.