The 18th version of Yale’s festival of new Italian films opened Thursday night with a dream, a betrayal, acts of torture, shakedowns, a trek across the Sahara, and a ship overcrowded with desperate immigrants pursuing a better life than deemed possible in the poorest parts of Africa.
Indeed, the graduate student who introduced the film compared the story’s hero, a 16-year-old Senegalese visionary named Seydou to Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, as this epic tale is fraught with plagues.
Yet “Io, Capitano” (“I, Captain”) has its tender and inspiring moments, and could not be more timely considering today’s diatribes on the subject of immigration.
Having been to the free film festival at the Whitney Humanities Center in many previous years, my anticipation level for the first showing was especially high; this is because I have a modest connection to the subject matter.
This is a composite story representative of what many people I had met in Italy had endured. People who had survived arduous and perilous journeys just to end up unable to find employment and, thus, are left begging on city streets.
They stand in front of bakeries, restaurants, and markets, their overturned caps held out. Their entreaties are polite, but to some natives a great offense.
In the beautiful Tuscan city of Lucca, where my wife Suzanne and I have had the privilege of visiting several times, I have spoken to them as we drop coins into their caps, as I want to know their stories.
Over years now, Europe has had to figure out how to accommodate millions of immigrants from poor countries, causing great turmoil in societies that had been homogeneous.
On that continent, as in the United States, the right has made full use of crimes committed against the native population, castigating the many over the crimes of a small percentage of new residents.
In the case of Lucca, a compromise has developed with the establishment at least of a safe place for African immigrants to live – if outside the walls. Yet I have never seen one behind a shop counter.
But in that city especially, irony and buried history have a heightened place in the maelstrom.
In late 1944, Allied forces moved up the Italian peninsula from Rome to reach and attack the German “Green Line” in mountains north of Lucca. From that defensive position, the Germans hoped to launch missiles that would destroy many Italian cities, including Lucca. But, oddly, it wasn’t only the Germans who intended to turn that city to rubble. It was Americans, too.
The commander of the “Buffalo Soldiers,” a white colonel whose battalion consisted entirely of black men, received orders from General Mark Clark to bombard Lucca in the effort to kill or capture the remaining German soldiers.
That would obviously put the 10,000 residents inside the walls as well as the dozens of churches, the scores of businesses, the old opera house, the birthplace of composer Giacomo Puccini, in great peril.
But one of the commander’s trusted staff members, Captain Charles F. Gandy, convinced his boss to undertake an alternative plan, in effect defying General Clark’s orders.
Gandy would spare the city by personally leading a small group of soldiers to places inside the walls where they could hunt down the remaining enemy troops. He did this with dispatch, and without putting citizens in danger.
Though he was briefly honored for his ingenuity and heroism, Captain Charles Gandy became lost to history for more than a half of a century until scholars uncovered the details, and the city constructed a modest monument to him outside the walls.
That a black man had preserved Lucca, though, is still not known to most of its residents today. And that discrimination against black immigrants seems an insult to Gandy’s bravery.
So, I made this point during the question and answer period at the festival. I did it because as we know history is a subject in regard to immigration or almost any other significant matter that has been corrupted by leaders in this country.
In efforts to destroy DEI and other virtuous programs that address bigotry, to engineer a federal takeover of universities, to impose a white Christian nationalist agenda, to eliminate due process, to ban books, and to make America unrecognizable and perilous for residents who refuse to kneel to the president, people who don’t read history have suddenly become self-proclaimed experts at it.
So, for me, following the opening film at the Whitney Humanities Center, I came away thinking of the exploits, determination, and courage of the hero of the story, young Seydou, hoping that some of that will rub off on us, and we can stand up to despotism.
The festival runs through Sunday. For information on the remaining films, see here.