Roman director with his new work Matteo GarronHe points to the distance he has made with the highly stylized cinema he has made since ‘Gomorrah‘ (2008) and instead connects with his first two feature films, ‘Terra de mezzo’ (1996) and ‘Ospiti’ (1998), again focusing on the drama of migration. Special, ‘I, the Captain’ follows the saga that a Senegalese teenager has been playing out with his cousin ever since he decided to flee his country He goes to Italy to realize his dreams, and during his journey he is subjected to repeated harassment by those who take advantage of the desperation and naivety of people like him. The film, which won an award at the last Venice Film Festival, is now nominated for a Golden Globe and continues on its way. On the way to an Oscar nomination.
Why did you decide to return to the issue of immigration, which you talked about in the first feature films of your career?
In these films I used this theme, first of all, to talk about Italy and Italians. ‘I, Captain’, on the other hand, serves as a counter-strike. We know very little about immigrants trying to enter Europe from Africa or the Middle East. Especially in my country, we are very accustomed to seeing them arriving in large numbers by boats, and we consider them as simple numbers: yesterday 200 arrived at sea and 100 died, today another 150 arrived and 75 died, etc. We don’t even take into account that behind these figures there are people who leave their families behind and face great risks in pursuit of their dreams. I wanted to give a voice to people who had almost no voice.
‘I, Captain’ is the first of my films featuring a completely flawless hero without any shadow or blemish.
To what extent were you aware of the risk of falling into cultural exploitation in this process?
I am a bourgeois Italian, and if I wasn’t careful, my view of immigrants could fall into paternalism, condescension and ethnocentrism. So I went to great lengths to mediate, to put myself at the service of a culture that was not my own, and to count on the permanent help of those who belonged to that world. At every stage of the production process, I sought advice from people who had experienced journeys similar to the one depicted in the film; There is a real story behind every scene. More than 27,000 people have died trying to reach Europe in the last 15 years, and it was important for me to treat this suffering with great respect.
Like many of his films, ‘I am the Captain’ portrays a character full of dreams and hopes who faces the facts. What draws you to this narrative archetype?
I think I find this very enlightening about the human condition. Anyway, ‘I am the Captain’ is my first film starring a pure hero who has no shadow or blemish, a pure and innocent young man who fights against a terrible and deadly system. Young Africans are part of the globalizing world, social networks are their window into the Western lifestyle and they have a great desire to live the way we live here. They see how young Frenchmen or Spaniards travel freely to Africa without any restrictions, and they do not understand why they themselves have to risk their lives to travel to Europe.
The film is resolved by several ellipses that allow each viewer to draw their own conclusions about the hero’s fate. Why did you find this uncertainty important?
Some of these human stories have happy endings, some end in tragedy, and it is often difficult to decide which is which. One of the main inspirations for ‘I, Captain’ is the case of Amara Fofana, who collaborated with me on the script. When she was 15, she saved the lives of 250 people by transporting them from Libya to Italy by boat. She was arrested on arrival and imprisoned for six months as if she were a human trafficker; If she had done the same thing today, she could have been sentenced to 10 years. While there are people like him currently paying a heavy price for their heroism, the gangsters who take advantage of them are not taking any risks.
To what extent is your film a veiled attack on the political leaders in Italy and elsewhere in Europe who encourage these mafias with their anti-immigrant and xenophobic attitudes?
I started working on this three and a half years ago, long before Georgia Meloni became the government in my country. It is true that the trend in Europe is to become obsessed with nationalism and wall-building, and that selfishness will only lead to more injustice, more suffering and more death. My film does not intend to offer easy solutions to such a complex problem, but of course I believe that the only true path is openness: giving those who want to travel the opportunity to do so freely and restoring dignity to this entire section. of humanity forced to die for a right that should be universal.