Adrian Matus reviews Matteo Garrone’s movie Io Capitano (Archimede, Rai Cinema, Tarantula, Pathé, 2023)and Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin’s Illegal, illustrated by Giovanni Rigano (London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2024)
The journeys of African migrants striving to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea have dominated the headlines for more than a decade. On one hand, the nationalist and right-wing populists, such as Meloni’s government, have exploited this tragedy to create anxieties about immigration, while humanitarian groups have blamed economic failures and human rights abuses as key factors resulting in the deaths of thousands. In this heated debate between populists and human rights activists, cultural products aim to humanize the migrant experience. Matteo Garrone’s movie Io Capitano (2023) as well as Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin’s graphic novel Illegal (2017), illustrated by Giovanni Rigano, tackle the tragedy of young teenagers seeking a better future in Europe, particularly in Italy, by riskily crossing both the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Dea. One of the primary aims of both cultural products is to go beyond the mere statistics. When interviewed by E. Nina Rothe in December 2023, for instance, Garrone stated: “Behind these numbers are human beings, human beings who are exactly like us, with the same desires – to move, to look for a better life, to discover the world”.
Whilst the subject is the same, the approach of the two cultural products differs in many crucial points. Matteo Garrone’s Io Capitano uses classic cinematic conventions to show the odyssey of Seydou and Moussa, two Senegalese teenagers, who dream of reaching Italy. Illegal, the graphic novel for teenagers and young adults, focuses primarily on the teenager Ebo’s perspective. Whilst focusing on the same sensitive topic, the approach is different and thus raises several questions: what are the limits of representation of human suffering? How to offer a balanced view using different visual tools to represent the migration experience? Lastly, how should an artist avoid reinforcing the existing narratives of suffering, yet at the same time present these experiences in an accessible way to the younger generation in educational settings, especially when demonized by the right-wing governments?
Io Capitano is not the first movie in which Matteo Garrone focused on social topics. Gomorrah (2008) presents the brutal impact of the Neapolitan mafia on local communities. Similarly, Dogman (2018) is a social reflection on how individuals become entangled in violence and criminal power. Both movies put a central emphasis on suffering and at the same time, use impressive cinematic techniques to convey the point. In this regard, Garrone keeps the same aesthetic line. He uses visually breath-taking shots of the Sahara Desert, crossed by Seydou and Moussa on their journey to Tripoli, as well as the dangers of the Mediterranean Sea. The broad shots reveal the immensity of the desert and the treacherous waters.
By drawing attention to the landscapes, Garrone plays with the multiple interpretations of maps. Io Capitano creates a double representation: the geographical landscape is doubled by the emotional landscape. This layered interpretation of the geographical space is most apparent when Seydou experiences visions of an old lady who had died of dehydration.
The dead bodies in the desert, the fatigue and the feeling of desperation aim to evoke a sense of empathy beyond sheer statistics. The cinematic shots of nature, in one way, help convey the message to the broader public, but at the same time, might limit the understanding of the human tragedy by aestheticizing trauma.
The graphic novel Illegal avoids such rich embellishments to convey its main point. Giovanni Rigano’s option to illustrate the story is to use a simple, clear visual language marked by cartoon-like images, vivid colors, and bold lines. The dangerous moments are signaled by darker tones, which create a clear contrast between safety and harsh moments. For instance, the chapters describing the sea quest (Chapter 3, 5, 7, 15, 17) use dark-blue tones to depict the danger of the sea and its tragedies. As the graphic novel targets teenagers and young adults, the style serves a practical purpose: it allows the graphic novel to be used as a teaching resource to raise awareness about the complex stories depicting crossing the Sahara and Mediterranean Sea. Thus, by avoiding complex symbolism and trauma aestheticization as the movie Io Capitano does, the graphic novel keeps the focus on the narrative and can be used easily in didactic settings for teenagers as well.
A shared theme is the ruthlessness of human smugglers who exploit travelers during their journey. Io Capitano’s great achievement is showing how informal underground networks function. For instance, the scenes depicting how the Lebanese mafia coerce the travelers to pay ransom for their freedom or sell them on the black market are particularly intense: the torture scenes are raw and brutal. Moreover, the reason why Seydou becomes the captain of the boat that crosses the Mediterranean Sea, is also framed from this perspective. Lacking enough money to cross the Mediterranean Sea, Seydou negotiates with Ahmed, the fixer, to get a place on a boat. Ahmed proposes to him a non-negotiable deal: Seydou should become the captain, as he is under-age and will not be arrested upon the boat’s arrival in Italy. From a broader perspective, when depicting the underground societies, Garrone has the unique trait of putting the viewer in the midst of the action and making them reflect on the events without idealizing the anti-heroes, as often cinema does. In this sense, Io Capitano adds nuance for a broader public by raising the awareness about the multiple vectors seeking to exploit the migrants’ dream to reach Europe.
On the surface, the political message might seem the same. It directly emphasizes the humanitarian crisis created by multiple vectors, among which we can list economic inequality, illicit migration and forced labor. Yet, on a deeper level, the focus falls on different points.
While both Io Capitano and Illegal do not shy away from naming the culprits the traffickers, only the graphic novel explicitly goes beyond creating a false dichotomy by clearly naming the passivity of Europeans.
In Matteo Garrone’s movie, the European border authorities are represented very vaguely; the whole action abruptly stops when the boat is spotted by the Italian border helicopter. The end, thus, is triumphal; the people from the boat rejoice at their arrival in Europe. Again, this ending proves to be problematic and raises further questions. On a more subtle level, the viewer can spot Garrone’s Orientalizing view in action; because the end is ambiguous and the Europeans are never directly present in the action, a possible interpretation of this open end can be that the problems end when the main characters arrive in Europe. The structural inequalities that exist in Europe are simply absent in this movie.
By contrast, Illegal directly engages its criticism also towards Europe through several points. While Io Capitano ends in an heroic, triumphant tone, the graphic novel’s ending is bittersweet – the main character, Ebo, indeed achieved his goal: he arrived in Europe, reunites with his sister, but at a great cost – he witnessed the selective rescue of the people from the boat, his brother drowned right before entering Europe, encountered difficulties and ruminations in the refugee center. His problems continued in Europe, as the graphic novel highlights in the last chapters. Giorgio Agamben might describe this situation as “bare life” – people that are physically present, but can be managed, detained, selected at the arbitrary will of the state. Thus, the gritty realism sheds light on the harsh experience of migration in Europe as well as the suffering endured by a large number of migrants. Other visual and textual elements reinforce Agamben’s concept of bare life. Ebo’s narrative is doubled by the story of the Eritrean refugee Helen, as told to the charity organization Women for Refugee Women and then adapted into a graphic form at the end of the book. The graphic novel’s authors Colfer and Dunkin’s stake is less on leaving the ending open for interpretations, but instead focus on highlighting the enormous costs of this risky travel and the experience of dehumanization.
The episode of the sunken boat just before arriving in Europe also emphasizes the tragedy of such a journey through the news that reports about it.
The news reduces the stories to sheer numbers and statistics and reports. This episode, again, is a powerful tool that Colfer and Donkin use to show the disconnection between the lived experience and how the stories are depicted in the media and how the harsh reality is reported in a reductive way.
Whilst both works aim to emphasize this point- as Garrone stated in the interview – Illegal puts the claim in more directly.
Thus, while both Illegal and Io Capitano turn the attention of the large audience to the tragedies about crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea, the stakes are different. Illegal’s primary purpose is to familiarize teenagers and young adults about this topic – therefore, and instead of using brutal scenes, the issues are raised in a more intellectual way, while cleverly avoiding didacticism. Therefore, this graphic novel fits as a good teaching tool that can raise the appropriate questions and help the teachers to convey this message. On the other hand, the movie Io Capitano had a different target audience in mind: the viewers and the festival juries. In this respect, using vivid scenes, exploring the entanglements between reality and fantasy, as well as depicting the underground world, was a bet to convince an adult audience primarily. To conclude, the powerful story of perilous migration is transformed into two distinct cultural products for distinctive audiences to foster empathy for one of the most pressing humanitarian crises of the last decade.
