written by Shelleen Greene
The following column is taken from Caliban #5 – Simon Boccanegra/The Power, on sale on the website of the Rome Opera House, effequ and in bookstores from November 27, 2024
It was also during this period of the fall of the Soviet bloc, that one of the most iconic images of contemporary non-Western migration is produced: the Vlora ship carrying hundreds of Albanians to the southern port of Bari in August 1991 after the country’s economic collapse. The image of the overcrowded ship was re-enacted in Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica (1994), a film set during the fall of the Albanian post-Cold War economy and based on the history of Fascist Italian colonialism in Albania between 1939 and 1943. While Amelio’s film was credited for drawing relevant connections between late 19th and early 20th century southern Italian emigration and the Albanian refugee crisis, the film does this by reiterating stereotypes of Eastern Europeans as non-Western other, and by rendering Italians as victims, first of post-Unification economic stratification that caused southern Italians to leave the country en masse, and second, in keeping with the Italian neorealist tradition, removed culpability in the fascist enterprise by representing Italians as “good people” (italiani brava gente), duped by a manipulative dictator.
While Italian migrant cinema incorporates several genres and forms, from film noir, psychological thriller, drama, and even comedy, within the last three decades, documentary has become a primary mode for representing the migrant experience, with, for instance, the international success of Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea, 2016), a documentary on the impact of Mediterranean migration on the lives of the residents of Lampedusa, achieving a new level of cinema verite as he brings together the quotidian and local with the global scale of immigration in the age of “Fortress Europe” and the necropolitics of European border regimes. We also see productions, often outside the commercial industry, that enact strategies that attempt to subvert and work against these (post)colonial optics, such as the work of sociologist and filmmaker Andrea Segre, whose films such as Come un uomo sulla terra (Like a Man on Earth, 2008), Mare chiuso (Closed Sea, 2012), and Ibi (2017) are participatory documentaries in which the filmmaker and the ZaLab documentary collective provide migrants equipment and training to produce their own films and become “authors of their own stories.” Filmmaker-scholar Simone Brioni has produced collaborative documentaries, such as Aulò (2009) with Eritrean-Italian poet Ribka Sibhatu, and Maka (2023) with Cameroonian-Italian anthropologist Genevieve Makaping, author of Reversing the Gaze: What if You Were the Other (2001), based on her anthropological methodology and her experiences migrating to and living within Italy for over forty years.
Other filmmakers have enacted experimental film strategies to reveal the long duree of Italian emigration and colonialism, making historical connections to Italy’s post-Unification era, pre-modern maritime economies, and even further, to Roman Africa in films as varied as Dal polo all’equatore (From Pole to Equator, Yervan Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, 1985), a meditation on the use of the camera in the colonial enterprise through a creative intervention upon the found footage of early 20th century Italian filmmaker Luca Comerio, to Sir Isaac Julien’s Western Union: small boats (2007), a meditation on contemporary migration to Italy through Luchino Visconti’s Il gattopardo 1963), his sweeping historical epic adaptation set during the final years of Italian Unification, and filmed in southern Italy, Sicily, and the island of Lampedusa, one of the first entry points to Italy for migrants crossing the Mediterranean.
Within this cinema, there are also the productions of African Italian directors, who are producing documentary, narrative fiction, and experimental films on the migrant and Black Italian experience that challenge the dominant perspective (often white and male) on migration to Italy. Filmmaker and activist Medhin Paolos and co-director Alan Maglio produced Asmarina: Voices and Images of a Postcolonial Heritage (2015), about the Eritrean and Ethiopian communities in Italy for over fifty years, challenging national narratives about the “recent” arrival of African migrants within the peninsula. Asmarina reveals a postcolonial archive that speaks to Italian colonialism in Eritrea and Ethiopia, and the long-standing presence of Italians of African descent in Italy. Filmmaker Dagmawi Yimer, the subject and co-director of Like a Man on Earth, and co-founder of The Archive of Migrant Memories (Archivio Memorie Migranti), has directed ASMAT-Names (2013), an experimental film commemorating the boating tragedy of October 2013 in which close to 400 migrants drowned off the coast of Lampedusa, and Va’ Pensiero – Walking Stories (2015), about racism and racist violence against African migrants in Italy. Filmmaker and educator Fred Kuwornu produced 18 Ius soli (2011), on citizenship rights for “second-generation” Italians, or Italians born of immigrant parents, who must apply for citizenship upon turning 18, Blaxsploitalian: 100 Years of Blackness in Italian Cinema (2016), and his recent We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (2024). Novelist, musician and filmmaker Antonio Dikele Distefano, has directed Autumn Beat (2022), a film about two African Italian brothers trying to succeed in the music industry, told over three decades, thereby writing the Black Italian experience into the larger history of postwar Italy, and the Netflix series, Zero (2021), loosely based on his YA novel Non ho mai avuto la mia età (I’ve never been my age), which became the first all-black lead cast in an Italian television series.
Numerous journal articles, major edited volumes and monographs are devoted to their study, notably From Terrone to Extracomunitario: New Manifestations of Racism in Italian Cinema (edited by Grace Russo Bullaro, Troubador, 2010), The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives (edited by Sabine Schrader and Daniel Winkler, Cambridge Scholars Publishings, 2013), Vetri Nathan’s Marvelous Bodies: Italy’s New Migrant Cinema (Purdue University Press, 2017), and Aine O’Healy’s Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Transnational Context (Indiana University Press, 2019). This scholarship has examined the Italian contemporary auteur films, including Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (Once you are born, you can no longer hide, Marco Tullio Giordana, 2005), La Sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman, Giuseppe Tornatore, 2006), Io, l’altro (I, the Other, Moshen Meliti, 2006), and Bianco e nero (Cristina Comencini, 2008).
In this three-decade expanse, Io Capitano is one of the most recent, and perhaps, most internationally recognized Italian film on African migration to Italy. Directed by transnational Italian auteur, Matteo Garrone, Io Capitano was Italy’s selection for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, and was nominated at the Golden Globe Award for Best International Feature Film. Within Italy, Io Capitano won seven Donatello awards, including best film and best director for Garrone. Io Capitano seems like a late addition, and arguably, lacks the nuance, introspection, narrative and formal complexity that characterizes many of the films in this canon, including Garrone’s own previous films. So, what does Io Capitano offer at this moment in the Italian and broader European migrant “crisis”? Like many Italian films about African migration, Io Capitano is silent or “amnestic” on Italian colonial legacies in the contemporary period of non-Western migration, especially in Libya, which it took possession in the Italo-Libyan war of 1911-1912, after its failed 19th century attempted conquest of Ethiopia, marked by the defeat at Adwa in 1896, and added to the Fascist Italian African Empire after the 1935-36 Italian-Ethiopian War. In terms of its production, the lead actors are French and Francophone, and the film is set primarily in Senegal, Tunisia and Morocco, former French colonies. This has the effect, first, of not drawing upon Italians of African descent who are already working within the Italian film and television industries, and second relatedly, continues a pattern, well documented in Italian films, of displacing Italian colonial expansionism onto other former European colonial powers, such as France and Great Britain, and ignoring the African diaspora already present in the peninsula. In Io Capitano, African migration remains on the margins of Italy.
Io Capitano ends with joyous cries of “Italie! Italie!” (spoken in French) from the passengers as they arrive off the Italian shore. In fact, Italy is finally represented by a hazy strip of land, at a distance, and by one, lone helicopter hovering over the ship. We then have a final close-up of Seydou as his shouts of “I am the captain!” are drowned out by the sound of the helicopter blades of the Italian Coast Guard, and the scene fades to black. What is to account for the film’s inability to represent the arrival of the African migrants on Italian shores? For Garrone, this has “already been done,” and as outlined above, there is no dearth of Italian films that document and examine contemporary migration. The ending close-up shot, along with the “Io” of the film’s title, places emphasis on a kind of individualism, of self-will, and self-determination that seems out-of-place and disingenuous given the numerous catastrophes that have occurred (and will occur) in the Mediterranean. In this sense, what Io Capitano offers is an Italian migrant film of (non) arrival, which speaks more to the ethno-nationalism of Italy’s current far-right administration and the governance of its borders.
In many ways, Io Capitano, on the cultural level, contributes to the justification of the militarization of the Mediterranean border. As scholar Gaia Giuliani argues in an article for «Journal of Intercultural Studies» [Vol. 45, No. 5, 2004, 926], while “[Io Capitano] saliently mixes up myth and reality, dreams and nightmares, memories and expectations of the young Senegalese migrant…[i]t fails to narrate whiteness and its processes of accumulation by dispossession…as the ordering technologies behind the border regime…The ‘white guy’ is the expectation to be fulfilled (the helicopters which finally reach the boat), instead of the ‘Deus ex-machina’ responsible for the border violence.” Indeed, the basis of much of the film’s wrenching and poetic images of prison torture, dead bodies strewn across the desert, precarious boats filled with desperate migrants drifting and left to die in the sea, are the result of Western European border militarization. Thus, another ending for Io Capitano, one in which Seydou and the other migrants are returned to Libya, or left to drown, remains unrealized in the film’s triumphal suspension of other, possible narrative outcomes. As seen in the Italian cinema of migration, these possible futures are not necessarily tragic, but take part in constructing narratives of the ongoing re-definition of Italian national belonging.
Calibano is the new magazine of the Rome Opera House. Created as a space for in-depth analysis and debate around topical issues raised from the performances on the theater’s program and realized in collaboration with the publishing house effequ, the editorial project involves, every four months, the publication and distribution in Italian bookstores of a monographic volume dedicated to an opera title and a related theme, through the commissioning of essays, short stories and reviews by authoritative signatures.
You can buy Calibano on the effequ website at this link, in bookstores and at the Rome Opera House shop.
The illustrations in this issue were made by Katie Morris.
