30/06/2023 - Through the particular journey of Sokuro, a young Burkinabe man living in Italy and about to get married, Mathieu Volpe paints a nuanced and embodied portrait of South/North economic migrations

After first revealing it at the Festival dei Popoli in a world premiere, Mathieu Volpe now presents in the National Competition of the Brussels International Film Festival his first feature documentary, An Italian Youth [+see also:
interview: Mathieu Volpe
film profile]. The film continues the reflection that began in his short film Notre territoire, a first-person account of his return to Rignano, Italy, a ghetto that gathers a great many  migrants from North and South Africa. 

In An Italian Youth, he meets up again with Sokuro, a 25-year-old Burkinabe he had first met a few years prior, on the occasion of his wedding in his home country with Nassira. For the young man, this union signifies his desire to return to ancestral traditions and to reconnect with his original culture. For the young woman, this is one step towards her dream of Europe, this eldorado many fantasise about but few actually reach. Sokuro therefore doubles his efforts. He works in a factory for hours on end, putting aside the little money he makes, counting and recounting it before sending it home to his future wife, all the while contributing to the smooth working of the family home in Italy, where his father struggles to make ends meet and to pay for the education of his young brother. Money is the crux of his life. It finds its way everywhere, infiltrating the young man’s personal, sentimental, and family life. How can one talk about love when the act of living fully is conditioned by economic conditions that are practically impossible to meet? Work and money are essential to the realisation of the two newlyweds’ happiness. They are key to an eventual family reunion, but also to their need to keep up appearances in Burkina. 

Faced with such precarity, Sokuro feels all the more helpless and lacking in agency when considering the fact that he had no say in this first migration. He is paying a heavy price for a decision made by his parents a few years prior. He faces another recurring phenomenon, common to second generation migrants, which is that of an uprooting that he did not choose, which does not mean that he has found a satisfying place in his host country, where precarity remains a part of his daily life. 

Mathieu Volpe invites us to follow Sokuro over a long period of time. Through a few key moments in the love story between Sokuro and Nassira, he offers another perspective on economic migration, which through this embodied representation takes on a more intimate quality. Regret, nostalgia and lack are the side effects of these reluctant exiles, done out of necessity rather than desire, that are too often kept in the shadows. By offering faces and bodies to a current topic, by embodying it and taking the time to explore its complexity, documentary cinema allows to deepen our reflection; Sokuro and Nassira’s contradictory yet profoundly human aspirations as well as their story is superimposed over the media narratives around the subject, enriching and humanising them. 

An Italian Youth was produced by Replica Films (Belgium), in co-production with Supermouche Productions (France) and 5e6 SPRL (Italy). The film is released in Belgium on 5 July.

(Translated from French)