Io Capitano review – chilling indictment of the refugee exploitation economy

Matteo Garrone’s new film is part adventure story, part slavery drama; the slavery which did not in fact vanish with the end of the American civil war, but thrives in the globalised present day without needing to shapeshift too much, driven by the age-old forces of geopolitics and the market.

Seydou and Moussa, played by nonprofessional acting newcomers Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall, are 16-year-old cousins in Dakar, Senegal, dreaming of escape to the fabled land of the EU as refugees, where they expect to go viral and make a fortune as music stars like the people they’re watching on TikTok. For years they have been writing songs and secretly working on building sites while pretending to go to football practice, amassing cash savings which in the succeeding months they will hand over to various gangmasters, fixers and corrupt gun-wielding soldiers.

The boys get into Niger on fake Malian passports whose obvious inauthenticity generates a handsome bribe-income for crooked border guards. They pay handsomely to join a group crossing the Sahara to Libya in an unsafe van; they then have to go on foot in the burning sand, their hatchet-faced drivers and guides ignoring the people who fall out of the vehicle or collapse with exhaustion on the way. In Libya the boys are separated, one taken to what passes for official custody, the other to a prison used as a torture factory and cash slave-farm by Libyan warlords. Here, terrified migrants are told to get their parents to wire their entire life savings over if they don’t want their children to be brutalised and killed; this is a truly terrifying sequence. The official and unofficial jails are brought by Garrone into ironic parallel.

The boys are ultimately able to offer the tiny residue of their savings to join a crowded boat heading across the Med to Italy. The gangsters chillingly agree on condition that the teenage torture survivor, Seydou, will be the boat’s notional captain – hence the movie’s title. The gangmaster pretends to “train” him on how to navigate and use the GPS and he is then put in charge of all the trusting, terrified adults as they put to sea.

This is a movie with passion and sweep, although I was less sure about the fantasy-reverie sequences. Reality is stronger ground. Apart from everything else, Io Capitano delivers some home-truths about the boats used; they are notionally “captained” by one of the passengers, a wretched soul who, due to a nauseating twist of fate, may well be even less qualified and less able than everyone else. And the film shows a gruesome irony at work: refugees are part of a toxic hoax economy. The fixers know well that these people will almost certainly die en masse in the desert or the ocean, and will be in no position to ask for refunds or warn anyone else.

Garrone shows Seydou battling heroically against this bad faith while growing miraculously into his captain status, despite the existential irony at work. Seydou and the others are not exactly masters of their fate, or captains of their souls, to quote WE Henley’s Invictus. They are swept along by power and inequality, but Garrone shows that their humanity and compassion are still buoyant.

• Io Capitano is in UK and Irish cinemas from 5 April.