IO CAPITANO

Two Senegalese teenage cousins take the perilous journey from Dakar in an attempt to find a better life in Italy. They encounter people-smugglers, bandits, corrupt police, imprisonment and torture, they witness death among fellow would-be migrants, are separated but find each other. The final leg of their gruelling journey finds Seydou having to be the helmsman (Capitano) of a ruinous ex-fishing boat crammed with people, trying to reach Europe. When anti-immigration sentiment is rife across Europe, Io Capitano is a punchy call to humanise those brave enough to risk all in aid of a promised oasis.

Preceding Io Capitano, is Fugitive in the Archive, a short film by Heather Marks, who will introduce her film. Fugitives in the Archive picks up Jeremiah’s trail in a meditation on the hundreds of young people of African and Asian descent who ran away from enslavement in Britain in the 17th to early 19th century; who for many the only trace left in archives are the advertisements announcing their escape published by the men and women who sought to capture them. In this assemblage of movement, found footage, and historical records, the film invites you into a dreamspace to meditate on the lives of the undocumented freedom-seekers both then and now and to consider ‘fugitivity’ as a technology through which to disturb the archive, asking what can exist beyond its limits.

Heather Marks is a British Nigerian-Scottish artist and writer interested in stories of the historic black presence in Britain, and ripples of the past that can be felt in our present. This is her first film. Heather is also a freelance creative producer, engagement lead, and editor whose authors have since gone on to win and be shortlisted for prizes such as the CWA Dagger and National Poetry Prize.

The screening of both films is through a continuing partnerswhip between Black Ark Media and the festival.