Winner: Silver Lion (best director), Venice Film Festival

Two Senegalese teenagers, Seydou and Moussa, travel from Dakar to Europe in the hope of becoming pop stars in Europe, finding danger, heartbreak, and unexpected joy along the way. An Italian-made film in which none of the settings, none of the actors, and very little of the dialogue are actually Italian, this is the immigrant journey told as a sweeping adventure epic. A breathtaking, high-stakes journey across desert and sea, Io Capitano features a phenomenal debut performance from Seydou Sarr. The film earned multiple prizes at the 2023 Venice Film Festival: the Silver Lion for Matteo Garrone’s direction, and the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Sarr’s riveting turn. Indiewire called it “an utterly stunning and uncommonly human look at the descent into Hades that so many people face when they journey to Europe, dreaming of creating a better life for themselves.”