At the end of “Io Capitano” (“I Captain”)In Matteo Garrone’s harrowing contender for best international film at next month’s Academy Awards, a map shows the journey of the film’s two teenage protagonists: over 3,500 miles from Dakar, Senegal to Sicily, through the sweltering Nigerian desert, horrific Libyan prisons and much more nerve-wracking crossing of the Mediterranean on board a rickety ship.

Such dangerous journeys, which countless Africans undertake every year in search of a new life in Europe, are “one of the great dramas of our time,” Garrone said in a recent interview, and “Io Capitano” is presented as an epic modern odyssey , with protagonists no less brave than Homer’s hero.

“It’s a journey that is an archetype that everyone can identify with,” said Garrone, best known to international audiences for the 2008 hyperrealistic drama.Gomorrah” and its dark and fantastic “Pinocchio” (2019).

“Io Capitano” is also a “document of contemporary history”. This month alone, over 2,000 people reached European shores via the Mediterranean, while at least 74 died, bringing the number of people missing in that sea in the last decade to over 29,000. according to the International Organization for Migrationa United Nations agency.

Many Europeans learn about these landings and deaths from short news segments, often accompanied by clips of lawmakers promising to stop illegal migration. Garrone’s film, which won the Silver Lion for best director at the Venice Film Festival last year, goes beyond statistics with a plot based on stories of real people crossing the Mediterranean.

Garrone, who lives in Rome, said he was inspired to write “Io Capitano” after his visit several years ago a Sicilian center This helps minors and hears the story of Fofana Amara, a man from Guinea who was just 15 years old when traffickers in Libya forced him to pilot a derelict ship carrying 250 people to the Sicilian port of Augusta because he couldn’t swim could and had no experience on the water.

As the ship approached Sicily, Amara recalled, a helicopter flew overhead and he began screaming to get its attention. After his rescue, he was arrested as a ship’s captain and spent two months in prison before being released because he was a minor. He was given two years probation.

When he heard Amara’s story, Garrone said, “he immediately thought of Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London and Joseph Conrad.”

In the film, Amara’s story is told through the character of Seydou, who leaves Senegal with his cousin Moussa, driven by youthful enthusiasm and the prospect of musical fame in Europe. After a series of disasters and setbacks, Seydou is forced to guide a refugee ship across the harsh Mediterranean, despite having never sailed before.

In a recent interview, Amara said he hoped the film would help viewers “understand what we’re going through.” It has now been 10 years since Amara began his journey and he said it was painful to see that such dangerous and often deadly crossings were still being carried out and were still met with general indifference from the European public.

“People are still coming, people are dying, some make it, others don’t, some don’t know their fate,” said Amara, who later trained as a skipper at a maritime academy and then moved to Belgium, where she is awaiting his asylum application must be checked.

To write the script, Garrone spoke to dozens of others who had also made the Mediterranean crossing, including Mamadou Kouassi, whose story became another key narrative source in the film. Nearly two decades ago, Kouassi left Ivory Coast at the age of 19 and embarked on a traumatic three-year odyssey through deserts, Libyan camps and a sea crossing in which three fellow passengers died.

“I call myself a survivor,” he said in an interview.

Kouassi spoke to the audience during the promotion of “Io Capitano,” noting that the film moved people to tears. “I say it’s not just my story, but the story of many people who went through this tragedy to come to Europe,” he said in the interview, adding that some of the things he witnessed were too cruel to include them in the script.

Kouassi now works in a town near Naples as a cultural mediator, helping newcomers from Africa and elsewhere navigate the peculiarities of a continent that is generally unwelcoming to them.

“It’s human to want to travel,” Kouassi said. “People had to move – no one can stop them. It’s like the sea: you can’t stop the flow of water.” This has particular resonance in Africa, the continent that has this the youngest population in the world70 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa are under 30 years old.

Garrone said he didn’t set out to make a political film, but “Io Capitano” “inevitably became political” because it spoke to the belief that everyone should have the right “to move freely, to discover new worlds and to experience”. It was important to the director that the film’s protagonists did not leave their homeland because of war, famine or climate change, but in the hope of a better future.

“Io Capitano” was filmed in Senegal, Morocco and Sicily in 2022, and migrants worked in the crew and as extras, letting Garrone know if they felt the story didn’t ring true. “We know that cinema is a collective art form,” Garrone said. “In this case it’s even more so because we really did it together.”

The director left the film’s Senegalese leads, Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall, in the dark about the fate of their characters. He shot chronologically and they didn’t get an advance script. “I wanted them to maintain a constant pressure without knowing whether they would arrive in Italy or not,” he said.

It was a life-changing experience for the actors, who were both teenagers during filming.

Fall said that while he didn’t know anyone who had crossed the Mediterranean, he did feel a “responsibility to be the voice of those who didn’t,” he said. “It wasn’t easy.” Since filming began, he has over a million followers on TikTok, many of whom rave about his sense of style. “My dream is to one day see my own designs on the streets,” he added.

Sarr, who won a best young actor award at the Venice Film Festival last year, said “Io Capitano” is “important for Africa and for Senegal.” Although he hopes to continue acting, he said his main goal is to become a professional soccer player.

When asked if he hoped to realize those dreams in Europe, he immediately replied: “Oh yes.”