‘Capernaum‘, the extraordinary film by Lebanese Nadine Labaki that won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2018 and was nominated for an Academy Award for best film in a foreign language immediately reminds cinema lovers of the most impressive sequences from Italian neo-realism cinema, filmed immediately after World War II, but also films such as Hirokazu Koreeda‘s ‘Shoplifters‘ depicting the social media plunged into poverty in today’s world. The main difference is that those films – inspired and well documented as they are – are still works of fiction, and most of the performers are professional actors. In ‘Capernaum‘ filming is done right in the slums of Beirut, and the actors are mostly real people who come directly from that environment, some of them illegal immigrants, and what they play on screen are their own lives or something very similar. The story of the making of the movie ‘Capernaum‘ could be as interesting as the story in the film itself. Between fiction and documentary, ‘Capernaum‘ is much closer to documentary, even if it retains a fictional narrative with a very original starting idea.
Nadina Labaki’s film offers an immersive experience in the life of Zain, a 12-year-old boy living on the streets of Beirut. The family is so poor that they don’t even have the money to enroll their children, and they live outside of any education, health or social care system. The boy works as a helper and porter at a shop and learns to survive on the streets of the city. When her parents decide to sell her 11-year-old sister in a forced marriage in exchange for a few chickens, Zain resists (unsuccessfully), revolts and runs away from home. He will be sheltered by an illegal immigrant from Ethiopia, in exchange for help in caring for a one-year-old child, and he will also be a child without an identity. When she disappears (arrested by the immigration authorities) Zain will have to survive alone with her little boy. Arriving in prison, he decides to sue his parents for giving birth to him.
The narrative structure seems chaotic, but in fact it is just a reflection of the lives of the heroes. All the filming is authentic, being done in the poorest neighborhoods of a city hit by poverty and wars, where every new day is a new attempt. Poverty and hunger are a constant threat and there seems to be no public or social framework to help these people, especially the children whose fates seem to be determined by birth. Nadine Labaki manages to put into action at best the actors who play their own lives on screen. The amazing lead actor, Zain Al Rafeea, is a Syrian refugee kid who found refuge in Sweden after filming. The atmosphere is overwhelming, and the authentic footage gives the film the power of a documentary, amplified by an emotional life story. At no point did I have the feeling of the director exploiting the situation of the film’s heroes, and this may be because the cinematic treatment is doubled by empathy and uses a style that reflects the point of view of the character. ‘Capernaum‘ offers its viewers a social and human document that deserves all the attention.