This year’s Oscar nominees in the Best International Film category offer harrowing true life survival tales.
“Society of the Snow” chronicles stranded Andes plane crash survivors while “The Zone of Interest” horrifies with lives blithely lived literally next to a Nazi extermination camp.
Matteo Garrone’s dramatic “Io Capitano” (“I Captain”) uses fiction to illuminate what may be this young century’s gravest issue: global migration.
“We wanted to finally show the world a part of the migrant’s journey that we don’t see. Because we are used only to see the last part of the journey, the moment that the boat arrives in Sicily, when they succeed, right?
“Because we know that 30,000 people have died in the last 10 years making this journey. So we try to humanize this problem,” Garrone said in fluent English in a Zoom interview.
“Io Capitano” follows two Senegalese teenagers (first-time actors Seydou Sarr, 17 when he filmed, and Moustapha Fall, 18) who trek from their African village where there are no jobs through the unforgiving Sahara desert to Dakar where they are imprisoned and tortured. Finally on the Mediterranean, they navigate a dangerously overcrowded boat to Italy.
Garrone (“Gomorrah”) initially resisted the topic. “I was worried first of all to be good enough. I didn’t want to be an Italian that used from my privileged position the migrants for show. As an Italian could I enter that world and create a story that could be honest and true?
“Honestly, it took years to make the decision. Eight years.”
After he’d made his last two pictures, “Dogman” and “Pinocchio,” “I don’t know how it happened but I started to work, started to listen to the story. I immediately realized that the only way to make this movie was to do it together. Give voice to people who usually don’t have a voice with their experience.
“Putting at their service my vision, we started with a script based on three true stories that we combined together.”
As for his untested two stars, “To help them we shot this in sequence, chronologically, so they would lead their journey with their character and the dialogue.
“Everything we wrote was what’s going on, how they feel inside.
“I put some elements of the real story of their lives and their passion for music to help them feel their character very close. And then I didn’t need to speak to them.
“When I went on the set, all the extras are real migrants. They helped us to recreate this odyssey. I would say they were co-director.
“Many times I felt I was a spectator at what was happening in front of me.”
“Io Capitano” (“I Captain”) opens Feb. 23.