Dwellers on Earth — Cinema and Immigration as Epic
Julio Torres’ Problemista and Matteo Garrone’s Io Capitano remind us that the epics of our time are stories of immigration. They could usher in a renewed cinematic perspective on a contested topic.
“Heaven, has appointed us dwellers on earth.” — Homer, The Odyssey
“We are only passing through on this earth” / “Estamos solo de paso en la tierra”- Rosa in El Norte (1983)
Ancient Greece was a culture that brimmed with stories. While ancient Greeks loved all narrative arts, there was one form that held a special place in their hearts: The epic, the story of a hero who embarks on a long, vast journey that leads him closer to himself, believed to be the story closest to the divine.
Today, we also live in a culture that overflows with stories. One narrative that seems to be defining of our time is that of a different epic hero — that of the immigrant (More ). Ask any immigrant, and you will hear accounts of a larger-than-life journey the magnitude of which is difficult to grasp in words or images.
The presence of immigration in the public discourse and its magnitude create the perfect opening for narrative interpretation. At the intersection of larger-than-life and other, the immigrant is the perfect canvas for myth-making. In the US, immigration holds a curious place of being a crucial part of the nation’s foundational story, while at the same time often being misunderstood and misrepresented. While some myth-making casts a negative light on the immigrant, some artists, poets and filmmakers have also linked immigration to ancient epics.
This parallel has been drawn by Caribbean poets like Derek Walcott (Omeros), but it is also present in cinema. Most recently, this cinematic tradition was brought to life in Julio Torres’ Problemista (2023) and Matteo Garrone’s Io Capitano (2023), both of which take inspiration from Gregory Nava’s El Norte (1984). Lastly, Lucy Mulloy’s Una Noche (2012) is a more subtle example of how the symbolism of Homer relates to immigration. These films show that in a globalized world, the ancient hero’s journey of leaving home in search of a higher goal is more alive than ever. Whether the tie to the epics are conscious directorial choices or not, I would argue that it is a comparison that can sharpen our perspective on a contested topic.
An art form at the verge of the divine
What really is an epic? With Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as the prime examples of the genre, epics recount stories of heroes who venture off to a vast, nation-spanning journey filled with obstacles. As the epic hero faces challenges, his identity is continuously re-negotiated. This is apparent in Odysseus’ repeated refusal to identify himself and symbols of rebirth through tunnels (the underworld) and the sea. This struggle with identity shows a journey that ultimately leads the hero closer to themselves — thus a journey outward and inward, creating a general sense of amplitude and scope.
Stylistically, Homer often expresses this amalgamation in phrasings that combine the inner and outer life such as “(Odysseus) weathered many bitter nights in his deep heart at sea,” which can be found on any and all pages of the Odyssey.
Beyond these broad strokes, epics typically contained certain stylistic and topical markers. Scholars Harmon and Holman outline ten characteristics, among them: A beginning in media res (“in the thick of things”), a vast setting that spans multiple nations, the invocation of a muse at the beginning, divine intervention into human affairs, a descent into the underworld, and heroes that embody the values of civilization. Characteristics like the invocation and divine intervention show that by putting themselves into the hands of the world, the epic hero physically embodies an interconnectedness between the gods and humans which the ancients, with their notion of fate, believed in.
Io Capitano (Garrone, 2023)
A recent example of immigration as epic is Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone’s grueling Io Capitano. Garrone, with his talent for examining the cruelties of life on the edge of society, tells the story of two Senegalese teenagers who decide to immigrate to Europe. The journey that awaits cousins Seydou (fatefully, “The lucky one”) and Moussa (“the seafarer” as Odysseus) is unimaginably challenging. On their way across the Sahara, they are confronted with death, separation from each other, physical torture, the forces of nature, and their emotional limits. Yet through their journey, the two discover in themselves deep hope and love — the epic journey that brings one deeper into the inner and outer world alike.
The epic proportions of the story are established early on. In a sequence that reminds of the Homerian invocation of a muse, Seydou and Moussa seek out a village elder in hopes to be granted spiritual permission to leave. Eager to leave then and there, the boys are told to take a pause and ask the ancestors for approval of their journey. Thus, Seydou and Moussa go to the graveyard, where the world around them comes to life, cinematically captured in high-angle shots. Trees sway back and forth in a storm and a swarm of birds circles around the two boys to foreshadow what the elder will tell them a few days later: Passage is granted.
The importance in this scene lies in that it explicitly sets up the journey of immigration as a quest of fate, highly connected to the metaphysical, to the boys’ place and purpose in this life and beyond. This is a journey that starts from a graveyard come to life, and very well might end in one.
When the two leave, Homer’s amalgamation between the outer and the inner becomes a beautiful dance between long shots and close-ups of Seydou and Moussa and their vast surroundings. Garrone shows the magnitude of their journey on the cousin’s faces just as much as with long shots of the Sahara desert that dwarf the pair.
The film then goes on to weave in elements of magical realism to further underline the transcendent nature of Seydou and Moussa’s next-to-impossible quest. There is a scene in the desert where a fellow migrant, an older woman, is too weak to continue. Exhausted and dehydrated, she collapses onto the desert sand. When Seydou, moved with compassion, holds out to encourage her, the woman suddenly starts to float mid-air. Seydou holds her hand, and together the two immigrants overcome and breeze through the impossible cruelty that life offers them in this very moment. Here, the epic proportions of the journey transcend the pain. In a moment of levity, the limitations of the physical are overcome. Like in all epics, “hope and fantasy closely coexist” (). Garrone does not only toy with ancient divine intervention here — this scene powerfully expresses the transformation of inner will into outer reality that one can see in Homer — only this time, it is a cinematic Fata Morgana rather than narrative reality.
After torture and separation, Seydou and Moussa finally do make it across the Sahara and onto a boat to Europe, but the journey left them nothing short of at their absolute limits. In this state, Seydou fully becomes Odysseus: Because the boys could not afford tickets for passage, Seyodu strikes a deal with migrant peddlers where he must captain the ship across the Mediterranean Sea in exchange for reduced fare. In a fairly direct quote from the Odyssey, Garrone’s protagonist is challenged to show extreme bravery by permitting himself into the hands of the ultimate symbol of the unknown, the sea (even the location of the Mediterranean Sea is a quote from Homer).
Io Capitano has been widely celebrated by critics for its portrait of modern day immigration. In my point of view, its strength lies in the tactful depiction of its heroes, and in beautifully portraying the challenges of immigration as a journey of overcoming great obstacles through humanity and courage. The story, one should add, is based on real-life immigrant stories which Garrone collected in interviews. However, the question of the intended audience remains: Who is this film made for? In her Katie Rife validly points out that the film walks — and sometimes stumbles along — a fine line between shedding a light on underrepresented stories and “misery porn.”
In other words, when stories of immigration for asylum are told from a Western perspective, the colonial gaze is unavoidable, sensitive and thoughtful as the depiction might be. An ironic example of this medial conundrum is a by the New York Times that shows Io Capitano being shown to people in Senegal. Here we have a Western news publication making a photo spread out of images of an African audience being shown a European film which supposedly depicts an African perspective about coming to the West — the underlying power structures of the discourse are painfully clear. These deeply unfair power dynamics that permeate the world of cinema and media are not something Io Capitano, well-meaning and cinematically inspired as it may be, can circumvent or solve.
However, sometimes the stories are told by migrants themselves.
Problemista (Torres, 2023)
Julio Torres’ Problemista shows the epic journey under a more lighthearted lens. Ale is a young Salvadorian who dreams of designing toys at Hasbro in New York City. Ale’s imagination is about as morbidly absurd as the immigration system he is about to enter. For example, one of his toy inventions is a truck with self-deflating tires, meant to teach children to play with a sense of urgency.
But before he makes it to gritty Brooklyn, Torres begins the story in a dreamscape of Homerian invocations in the middle of the Salvadorian rain forest, the filmmaker’s own home country. Here, Ale and his mother live in a maximalist paradise, their home surrounded by eccentric toy inventions and the occasional mysterious call from the dark forest to who knows where, awakening in Ale a desire to venture off. This is a mystification of the home that is not unlike that in Homer’s epics, a mystification that is often present within immigrant narratives. This is a home defined by the callings to leave, and the longing to return, similar to Ithaca.
If Homer invoked the muses to tell a story as close to the gods as the Greeks believed possible, Problemista echoes this setup with a healthy sense of postmodern irony, as Ale quickly finds that leaving is easier dreamed than done. The world he finds in New York, symbolically shot in red, white and concrete, seems to be filled with vague omens that feel detached from their meaning. What does a purse caught between subway doors, chaotically dispersing pill containers into a train car of exhausted city dwellers mean? Ale’s guess is as good as yours. Problemista knows: The modern immigration experience makes life feel sublime at best, and ominous and nonsensical at worst.
As Ale struggles for permanent residency in the US, Torres introduces a more direct visualization of the epics. When Ale learns to navigate different visa rules, the US immigration system comes to life on a meta level, visualized as a labyrinth that forces one to duck, find secret doors and tunnels (see ). There are signatures to obtain, obscure computer programs to master, and odd jobs to be completed. Here, Ale even meets a “Craigslist monster” who helps him navigate ways to earn cash without a visa. This gamified visualization reminds of Homer’s divine intervention and is a common trope in how ancient epics have been made palatable.
But Torres goes even further: It is when Ale loses his first job and needs a new visa sponsor, in that feeling of helpless dependence on fate, that he meets Tilda Swinton’s Elizabeth. With her fiery hair, Medusian glare, crouched-over posture and intense presence, Elizabeth is a mythical figure come to life. Like Ale, Elizabeth is a larger-than-life, stubborn-to-the-bone dreamer. Sure enough, short-fused Elizabeth is nicknamed Hydra. In one of the film’s meta-level scenes, Ale fights Elizabeth-turned-Hydra with a sword, a quite literal depiction of the hero’s journey.
As Christina Urrutia in her review, this expansion of the narrative into an epic meta-level helps show that immigrants constantly have to operate within a margin of no error, but I find that the effect can also be trivializing. In reality, the signature for a visa sponsorship is far from a stroke of a magic pen, but rather one step in a long journey. Thus, Torres’ divine interventions are a convenient way to circumvent the nastier sides of a system. When Problemista’s immigrants vanish into thin air in an “immigration office” (which also does not exist in this form in real life), the reality of such a case would of course be much darker and messier. The attentive immigration officer who helps Ale navigate the system is another example of well-meant fiction.
While the film is tender towards the immigrant struggle, it might be this abstraction that has lead to many critics overlooking what the film has to say about immigration. Tellingly, that “You don’t have to be a Salvadorian immigrant to meet someone like Elizabeth Ascensio.” Except, maybe you do. Maybe one can only fully meet Elizabeth/Hydra within the dystopian power dynamics of the US immigration system.
The character of Bingham (James Scully) exemplifies this conundrum. Being American, well-off and well connected, Bingham is able to form a completely different relationship to Elizabeth/Hydra, getting to meet her as a more pleasant person. Still, there is something Bingham misses out on — unlike Ale, he does not get to experience the emotional bond of two people who strive to test the boundaries of the possible, in art as in life and, as the ending shows, beyond, where Ale and Elizabeth experience the ultimate expansion of inner and outer.
Though very different in tone, Io Capitano and Problemista both seem to be influenced by a film that has paved the way in telling stories of immigration as epics — Gregory Nava’s gorgeous and influential El Norte (1984).
El Norte (Nava, 1984)
El Norte tells the story of Enrique and Rosa, a brother and sister pair of political refugees who flee from Guatemala to California. Director Gregory Nava begins the story in Guatemala, where a communal village lives in close relationship with nature. In a nod to cinematic magical realism, Nava’s camera weaves seemingly prophetic images together to create the Homerian sense of connection between inner and outer life we have seen in Problemista and Io Capitano. For example, one scene shows Rosa in a room surrounded by white butterflies after her parents passed away, which Nava cuts against her fingers touching white flower petals on the earth which her parents are buried in. Frequent reaction shots between Rosa and elements of nature such as the full moon, animals, or a flower, create a world in which nature is full of humanity, and humans are in constant communication with it. This is a world in which the divinity of the epics has room to come to life. Fittingly, the Guatemala sequence is mostly shot in twilight, with its blurred vision, its air of change, ambivalence and proclivity to omens.
In front of this background, Homer’s invocation is introduced as Rosa prays to ask for permission to leave. Musical cues like bell tolls and descending fourths, typically symbols of calling, are heard. At her father’s funeral, Rosa and her family silently sit in the morning fog. Breaking the silence, Rosa prophetically proclaims: “We are only passing through on this earth.” A religious statement, but also a foreshadowing of Rosa’s and Enrique’s journey as immigrants, yet again the connection between the metaphysical and the physical.
Enrique and Rosa embark on an exhausting, exciting, scary, heartwarming and even humorous journey that culminates at the US border, where Enrique and Rosa start a literal “descent into the underworld,” as Harmon and Holman categorized this convention for epics. At the advice of their “coyote”, the pair crosses the border below ground in a sewage pipe, out of border patrol’s sight. In a tortuous scene, the pair crawls through a dirty, tight and seemingly endless tunnel, symbolically reminiscent of Hades’ underworld. The most horrific moment of the film shows a swarm of rats viciously attacking the two immigrants in the tight tunnel with no room to escape. To make this scene more realistic, Zaide Sylvia Guiterrez, who plays Rosa, insisted on filming with real rats, despite her intense panic of the rodents.
In the epics, the descent into the underworld was a crucial part of the hero’s journey, challenging the hero to face the ultimate limits of the outer world — at the literal limits of the outer world, the hero meets the metaphysical and must descend before he can rise again. While El Norte borrows this symbolism, here the descent into the underworld proves fatal — Rosa dies of an illness caused by the rat bites. But El Norte is not the only story that adds a tragic twist to the epics.
Una Noche (Mulloy, 2012)
So far, we have discussed films that with fairly direct references to the epics, but more subtle references can be found throughout the genre. Una Noche is a gut-wrenching film that follows three Cuban teenagers on their attempt to escape the island. The film takes its time to introduce Elio, Lila and Raul, intimately showing their daily lives, their relationship to each other, their flirtations, their trust, their moments of pain and eventually, their desperation to leave Cuba which turns into a calm resolve.
Even if the references might not be conscious choices, Una Noche is full of the Odyssey. There is the poetic centrality of the sea as a main character from the start, frequently shot as the background, shown in all its moods and tempers. Effervescent and short-tempered, the sea is depicted as a reflection of fear just as much as one of hope and beauty. The importance of the sea as a main character is stated from the opening scene, when the teenagers jump into the ocean on a hot summer day. Unable to swim and keep herself afloat, Lila needs to be helped. The inevitability of the sea, its unreliable tempers, its power as grating death or passage, are established from the start. They remind of the ancient notion of fate, and are poetically captured by Mulloy. A shot of Raul biking alongside the roaring waves of the coastline, alone on his bike and with only one shoe, is a beautiful capture of the sea as the bringer of fate.
Another instance that feels like an echo to the epics is a pivotal plot point in which Raul accidentally causes a tourist to be stabbed in the eye, which makes him a prosecuted criminal. The image of the raging tourists with one stabbed eye reminds of Homer’s raging cyclope, stabbed in the eye by Odysseus.
Just like in the other films, Una Noche brims with suggestively symbolic objects and scenes that give the impression of prophecies. A yellow canary in a cage, a shot of birds roaming the sky, abandoned shoes appearing on floors and not on feet, and shards of colorful glass along the sidewalks, all paint a colorful surrounding that seems to overflow with omens. Strikingly, Una Noche’s invocation of the muse scene almost exactly mirrors that in Io Capitano. Before Lila, Elio and Raul start their voyage, they visit a woman who seems to be a psychic. With wild gestures and ritualistic water spits, she sends them on their way, connecting their journey to a spiritual quest.
Finally the three teenagers leave Cuba. With the speed and graciousness of youth, Una Noche guides its three characters onto a makeshift raft that tries its best to get Elio, Lila and Raul to Miami. The fondness with which Mulloy has portrayed Elio, Lila and Raul for more than an hour, intimately pulls viewers into the urgency of the scene at sea. The sea, this ancient symbol of life in its rawest form, the magical realm of divine force for Homer, proves too strong of a force. There is no divine intervention in Una Noche, and the now incomplete group is relieved to make it ashore at all. For Homer, Odysseus’ shipwrecks were distinct moments of his re-birth. Mulloy keeps the lyrical portrayal and symbolism of the sea, but the shipwreck leaves little room for Homer’s idealistic vision.
A Dare Against History
To understand what it means for these films to reference the epics, or — if we don’t believe these are conscious references — for us to read them as such, it helps to take a closer look at the genre’s historiography.
If the genre of epic was the pinnacle of art, Homer was the pinnacle of the genre. Homer’s epics were held in such high esteem that the genre name eventually became tied to his very name. Nagy writes that by 300BC, the Iliad and Odyssey became the only two publicly recited epics. New epics were no longer written, as the height of the form had unequivocally been reached in these two poems.
Thus, the heroes’ journey became somewhat of a hero in itself. Untouchable, Homer took the genre of the epic to his grave, and the epic remained “stranded in splendid isolation, and stranded for good” (Nagy).
Referencing a genre so thoroughly defined by its historicity is a dare to think of our contemporaries in the contexts of history. It is a dare to see Seydou, Ale, Elio, and Rosa as heroes of epic proportions. Beyond elevating immigration stories, appropriating a genre so firmly rooted in the past is an act of protest against the rigidity of history.
Even if we do not accept that these films take direct reference to the epics, we must acknowledge that with Io Capitano and Problemista, recent independent filmmakers take interest in a symbolical language that counteracts a very different myth-making around immigration in the media: That of the immigrant as a border being, presumably dangerous and criminal. In this narrative, concepts like legality create distance between the immigrant and the general population. Such story-telling in the news media typically holds little regard to a balanced view of immigration as it excludes the benefits that immigration brings to a globalized world, be they economic, cultural, or interpersonal.
Beyond any socio-political statement, telling immigration as epics in the medium of film is also an interesting reconnection to how the Ancient Greeks viewed this form of art, in that both are told in a way that highlights their mediality.
The Greeks also saw the metaphysical dimension of the epic journey present in the form in which epics were performed. In contrast to tragedy and comedy, epics were simply recounted by a single reader (Epē = voice), which in ancient Greek belief honored their supposed direct and uninterrupted connection to the gods. As scholar Gregory Nagy , the Greeks viewed the creation of art as a hierarchical process, with divine inspiration at the top, to which muses, then the voice (Epē), and then the recipient were linked. In the dramatically enacted forms of art, an additional level is added in the form of an actor, furthering the distance between idea and recipient. Thus, epics were an art form that emphasized the channel between muse and listener in a more direct way than other forms of art.
When the ancient Greeks understood epics to be more directly connected to the gods than the diegetically enacted tragedy and comedy, the same can be said for film. Theorists such as Andre Bazin view cinema as a a form of art that holds a more direct relationship with reality, thanks to its mediality.
This is of interest because Io Capitano and Problemista seem to be two examples of an uptrend in films about immigration within the last 10–15 years, many of which have been described with language around the epics, including Sin Nombre (2009), Human Flow (2017), The Immigrant (2013), Dheepan (2015), A Better Life (2011), and Beast of No Nation (2015). Others, like Sons of Monarchs (2020) and El Mar La Mer (2017) carry characteristics as well. As films about immigration are on the rise, we might see more of these stories and benefit from a broadened perspective on them. Since 2016, the Global Migration Film Festival, organized by UN-related International Organization for Migration highlights and supports films on the topic.
Yet, it is important to ask who these stories are made for. The case of the Io Capitano NYT photo spread shows that even a positive depiction of immigration is often still deeply embedded in the colonial gaze. The abundance of real life heroic stories goes beyond the confines of what cinema can tell, yet not enough cameras are in the right hands.
As I write this, I am thinking of the fellow immigrants I have met in New York, their stories painting pictures of teenagers secretly fleeing under the nightly cloak of darkness, of crying elders at airports who intuitively knew this would be the last time they saw a young person, of nightly car rides on the open back the pick-up truck, staring into the eyes of a lioness as she chases the car. When telling these stories, we as immigrants often gravitate towards prophetic-feeling symbols that naturally evoke Homer and his connection of the inner world with the outer world.
More so, we see our homes in the enchanted light in which Odyssey sees Ithaca. We marvel at the loss for words when it comes to a journey of such personal magnitude. These are tales of overcoming, of finding oneself, filled with vague omens and a feeling of inner and outer expansion. They are tales of harassment and discrimination, but also of perseverance and pride, of hearts that will forever live in two places, of the pains and joys of living a life in two or more different languages. They are stories big enough to fill many more screens.
Likening immigration to epics is not simply a theoretical observation. It is a reality that lives in stories around us, if we truly take the time to listen.
