“I Captain” by Matteo Garrone in Valparaíso
- Insomnia Theatre, Condell, Valparaiso.
- Thursday the 7th (9:30 p.m.), Saturday the 9th (10:00 p.m.) and Wednesday the 13th (9:30 p.m.).
“I Captain” (“Io Capitano”) is a film directed by Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah, Dogman), starring Seydou Sarr, Moustapha Fall and Issaka Sawadogo, which offers a sharp critique of modern-day Europe and the crisis. culture of our world. With a stylized aesthetic and a skillful, classic narrative, it follows two young people, Seydou and Moussa, who, after saving a good amount of money, leave their hometown (Dakar) to head north, bound for Europe.
Without their families knowing and with the dream of being able to send money home, they begin their adventure without knowing that they would have to face a hard road through the desert, armed gangs and thieves, the horror of the detention camps in Libya and to the danger of the sea.
The harshness of life of precarious migration from Africa to Europe is portrayed through the eyes of the two protagonists. The particularity of the story is that these young people do not start from the war, but are mobilized by their dream of becoming Youtubers in the first world.
“The film was born from the idea of narrating the epic journey of two young Senegalese migrants who cross Africa, with all its dangers, to pursue a dream called Europe,” Garrone highlights. “To make the film, we started from real testimonies of those who have lived this contemporary odyssey and we decided to put the camera from their point of view, in a kind of counterpoint with respect to the images that we are used to seeing from our Western perspective, in an attempt to finally give a voice to those who normally do not have one.”
For Claudio Pereira, programmer of INSOMNIA, the film: “I Captain by the great Italian director Mateo Garrone, the journey is heartbreaking, to cross the sea, but instead of encountering monsters and mermaids, they face the most terrible fragility, abandonment. and desperation to reach Europe from Senegal. Jumping into the ocean means committing the lives of many entire families to get a glimmer of hope for something more worthy. With Gomorrah and Dogman, this director demonstrated the power of cinema language to convey human intensity and desperation when threatened to fulfill his expectations. An excellent premiere to remember that human dignity is in danger every day in the face of the misery of an unequal economy in the world, which transforms countries into first and second category societies.”
The film has been acclaimed at Festivals around the world. In Venice it won the Silver Lion award for Best Director and Emerging Actor, in San Sebastian it was recognized as Best European Film and obtained a nomination at the Golden Globes and the Oscars in the category of best international film.
