Rated: M
Directed by: Nadine Labaki
Screenplay by: Nadine Labaki, Jihad Hojeiy, Michelle Kesrouani
Screenplay in Collaboration with: Georges Khabbaz
The Participation of: Khaled Mouzanar
Original Music: Khaled Mouzanar
Produced by: Khaled Mouzanar, Michel Merkt
Starring: Zain Al Rafeea, Yordanos Shiferaw, Boluwatife Treasure Bankole, Kawthar Al Haddad, Fadi Kamel Youssef, Haita Cedra Izam, Alaa Chouchnieh, Nadine Labaki.
A slice of life taken from the streets of Lebanon, Capharnaüm means chaos: a place where kids get washed-down by hoses at a car repair garage, old men wear cockroach-man costumes with sticky tape wound around the wing of glasses, and to stop kids crying out in hunger, they’re feed ice cubes dusted with sugar instead of food. These are the details that give this film life.
Capharnaüm is a story of fiction based on many true stories. This is a story about Zain (Zain Al Rafeea) who eventually sues his parents for being born. Into a hell, to be constantly told to f*#k off. Without papers, to be nothing but an insect.
But without children, ‘you’re not a man’, explains his father.
To keep the tone of the film as close to the true stories director Nadine Labaki heard as she researched the project for three years, walking through the streets and detention centres, she cast non-professional actors to play a part very similar to their own lives. The judge is an actual judge. The Daraa clashes in Syria (2012) forced Zain’s parents to move to Lebanon with four children.
Nadine walked with cap and sunglasses until she found the source for the story she wanted to convey – one of destitution, courage, the want to be a good person and all the eating of shit to survive.
Zain lives in a household where his parents fight for every scrap, the children too poor to go to school. Twelve-year-old Zain is sent to work at the landlord’s market where he carts containers of water while watching a school bus, front grill packed with children’s backpacks, the bus a place where he should be: talking about tests coming up, notebooks to be filled.
The little man in a blue jacket, white stripes down the sleeves – he watches.
When his parents sell his adored sister off to the landlord in marriage at the age of eleven, he leaves home.
I immediately warmed to this kid, his courage and maturity, his love for his sister Sahar (Haita Cedra Izam), trying to protect her from the world he understands too well.
Fending for himself on the street, Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw) an Ethiopian woman and illegal worker who can’t afford to renew her forged papers, takes Zain home. She has a baby, Yonas (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole) to care for and no one to look after him while she works. It’s a calculated risk shown in the look of a mother leaving her baby with an eleven-year-old stranger.
And what a beautiful baby. I could not watch this film and not fall for this child. So adorable, even the guys in the audience were captivated by Yonas’ clapping hands and sudden grin.
It’s the characters who take the hand of the audience, to lead through the squalor, where the small sparks of beauty are made more touching.
We see Zain struggle until eventually he’s incarcerated: ‘Stab the son-of-a-bitch!’ Zain yells when he’s being held in jail. To be taken to court, to sue his parents.
Capharnaüm doesn’t have the tone of a drama or even a documentary. There’s something in-between here – a picture of how it goes when your parents are too poor to get a Birth Certificate, to be not recognised as a person, not exist: to be no one.
There’s this moment where Zain patiently corrects a girl selling funeral wreaths that the man’s name is ‘Aspero’, not ‘Ospero’. I’m sure this was off-script but another moment to add to the story. To see more of the boy, Zain.
There’s something so refreshing about the honesty of this kid.
The camera is shot low, to show the point of view of these no-one kids, trying to be good. Trying to survive. Trying to tell the adults not to be idiots.
Yes, it’s a sad story. But I found myself filled with a faith in humanity, to see the courage and love from the ones that society is supposed to be taking care of.
Ironically, the ones who are no-one made me want to believe in people again.
