Io Capitano was the least familiar of the five Oscar contenders for Best International Feature, partly because it wasn’t screened until the very last days of 2023 and only in New York City and Los Angeles.

In his masterful film, which won fourteen(!) awards at the Venice Film Festival including top directing and acting prizes, Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah, Dogman) presents a "reverse shot" of the immigration experience creating an epic, cinematographically magnificent odyssey from West Africa to Italy. The story is told through the mind’s eye and experiences of two Senegalese teenagers living in Dakar who yearn for a brighter future in Europe. Yet between their dreams and reality lies a treacherous journey through a labyrinth of checkpoints, the scorched Saharan desert, a fetid North African prison and the vast waters of the Mediterranean where thousands have died packed inside vessels barely fit for passage. In Wolof and French, with English subtitles. 121 minutes.

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