Matteo Garrone: “There are already too many films of European bourgeois who feel sorry for the poor emigrant” | EUROtoday

The Italian director premieres the movie shortlisted for the Oscars ‘I Captain’ and takes the chance to mirror on human rights, justice and the duty of cinema

• Cine The 10 greatest worldwide movies of 2023, from ‘The Zone of Interest’ to ‘Rotting within the Sun’
• Interview Juliette Binoche: “The identity of France is precisely its diversity, its lack of identity”

Account Matteo Garrone (Rome, 1968) who seems like being in Venice alone. In actuality, she is accompanied by the protagonists of his movie, Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall. But he misses (or so he says) the particular person most chargeable for I captain, his final movie. It all began, she remembers, when she discovered the story of the boy who by accident grew to become the skipper of a ship loaded with 250 folks. He was solely 15 years previous and, after barely setting foot on land, he was detained for six months.

Today he lives in Belgium, he works as a stocker in a grocery store, however he doesn’t have his papers so as. And therefore the loneliness of the director. The tape has simply been shortlisted for the Oscars after successful the awards for greatest director and actor on the Mostra. The story of two associates is advised from his native Dakar to Sicily; It is a narrative of journey that can be a narrative of survival. It is a narrative near the Odyssey and on the similar time rabidly modern. It is unique and pressing, now and all the time, in regards to the loneliness of a director and that of everybody.

It is maybe his first movie exterior of Italy…

It has taken me years to make the choice to do it. I didn’t really feel snug or able to approaching a narrative in a language that I have no idea, a couple of tradition that’s not mine and starring characters that, ultimately, are fully international to me. I did not need to develop into an intruder, a vacationer of different folks’s misfortunes. There are already too many movies of European bourgeois individuals who really feel sorry for the poor emigrant.

And what has modified to resolve to make the movie?

I need to assume that it was the movie that selected me. When you place off a challenge 12 months after 12 months, there comes a time when the movie itself takes form and imposes itself on you. Every story finally ends up discovering its place. The basic factor is to search out somebody to introduce you to such a fragile matter and all the time hear from probably the most absolute humility.

The movie arrives at a time when emigration occupies a main place on the European agenda and, for that matter, on the Italian one. Is it your manner of responding to the acute proper?

I began engaged on the movie three years in the past, when there was no right-wing authorities in Italy. What the movie talks about is human rights, injustice… And that is aware of no extra political debate than recognition. In a civilized society nobody may be in opposition to human rights or in opposition to justice. It all begins from a really fundamental absurdity. I’ve made all the movie with Africans and they don’t perceive why Europeans can go to their nation peacefully they usually must danger their lives to go to Europe. It is one thing so apparent that they don’t perceive it as a result of it’s merely incomprehensible. But, in any case, I’m clear that the years will go and we are going to proceed arguing about the identical factor. I do not assume it’s an argument on the agenda now, it’s a common argument of all occasions. The solely approach to fight human trafficking is to increase the suitable to visas. Everyone has the suitable to journey and to have the ability to work. Right now visas are solely granted to those that have a checking account and, actually, I do not assume that is truthful. In reality, it isn’t truthful. And what I say isn’t a query of politics within the strict sense, it goes far past this or that exact authorities.

Your movie has one thing of the Odysseyhowever not returning residence after the warfare however fairly trying to find a brand new residence within the midst of a every day warfare that doesn’t finish…

I want to search for parallels with one other traditional story: Pinocchio. Like him, the protagonists run away from residence in the hunt for one thing new. In this case, the function of Gepetto is performed by the mom. Also on this case there’s a Lucignolo, who’s the one who methods and convinces Pinocchio to flee to the promised land. And all the story is constructed on the warning that violence reigns exterior the house. We should not overlook that Collodi’s textual content is mainly an ethical story. And I wish to assume that my movie may also fulfill that very same goal: be a warning in regards to the risks that threaten us as a society if we surrender social justice.

So it is a story that has already been advised.

I do not imagine it. In normal, we have a look at emigration from our facet. But we should not have any kind of creativeness about what occurs on the opposite facet. Reconstructing the journey to our borders can be a manner of humanizing the story, of placing a face and eyes to one thing that’s typically nothing greater than figures of lacking and useless folks. Behind each sufferer there’s a household, a narrative, a need, a collection of goals… And you will need to make all of this clear. There is not any ethical duty for what has neither picture nor story. And denying that story is a manner of dehumanizing the victims. And the latter isn’t just rhetoric, I believe it’s the basic level. I’m not in favor of turning violence right into a spectacle, however it’s important that those that undergo violence are effectively current in entrance of the digital camera.

How would you describe the duty of cinema?

Whenever struggling folks seem on display screen, duty is greater than only a phrase or a goal. Cinema has the duty and even the duty to indicate what’s normally hidden. We are speaking about 25,000 deaths. Telling the reality, even by means of fiction, is crucial. Each of the tales advised within the movie is supported by an affidavit from somebody who went by means of the identical factor. With this I don’t imply that the tape is a set of statements. You cannot lie, invent or poeticize somebody’s struggling. Pain is ache, not the plot for a pleasant story. At the identical time that we’re in Venice surrounded by the paraphernalia of a movie competition, proper now persons are dying on this sea or somebody is being tortured in Libya or there’s somebody dying of thirst within the desert. We must stay with this contradiction.

---