Capernaum
Short description
Capernaum centres on Zain, a twelve-year-old boy living in poverty in Beirut. Rather than attending school, he works to bring money home to a large family and looks after his younger siblings. After his parents give his younger sister Sahar away in marriage, Zain leaves home and meets Rahil, an Ethiopian migrant working without documents, who lets him look after her young son Yonas in exchange for a place to stay. Zain's circumstances eventually land him in prison, and from there he takes his parents to court over the life they have given him.
The film is directed by Nadine Labaki, her third feature after Caramel and Rio, I Love You, and she wrote the screenplay with Jihad Hojeily and Georges Khabbaz. Zain Al Rafeea plays Zain, with Yordanos Shifera as Rahil, Boluwatife Treasure Bankole as Yonas, Kawsar Al Haddad and Fadi Kamel Yousef as his parents, and Cedra Izzam as Sahar. Produced across several countries including Lebanon, France and the United States, it was made for about 4 million USD and took roughly 64 million USD worldwide.
Audiences rate it highly: 8.4/10 on IMDb from around 123,000 votes and 8.2/10 on TMDB from about 2,000 votes. The film critics' rating stands at 7.8/10 from 181 reviews, somewhat lower than the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Participation in the film helped change the lives of everyone involved in the production – the non-professional actors whose fate and daily lives were not far removed from what was shown in the film. Currently, the film's main character, Zein, lives in Norway with his family in a house by the sea and attends school.
- The main character, Zayn, was also found through street casting. His real name is Zayn, and like his character, he was presumably 12 years old during filming. Due to the military conflict, Zayn and his family moved from Syria to neighboring Lebanon. He is a Syrian refugee. For eight years, he lived in very difficult conditions in one of the areas that the viewer sees in the film, in circumstances that are worse than what the viewer sees in the film, and, like his character, he worked illegally from a young age. Zayn never went to school. At the time of filming, he couldn't even write his name.
- The film was made with the participation of non-professional actors. All the actors were found through street casting. Children and adults were found on the street and asked to answer a few questions on camera. For example, children were asked: “Are you happy to be alive?” Most children answered this question in a similar way: “No, I wish I were dead,” “I don’t know why I live,” and so on. None of the children auditioning knew how old they were, when or where they were born, and they had never celebrated their birthday.
- The film's premiere in Cannes on May 17, 2018, concluded with a 15-minute standing ovation.
- Since the film features non-professional actors, director Nadine Labaki asked the characters during filming to react spontaneously to the scripted scenes, using their own words and gestures. When their acting deviated from the script, Labaki adapted the story to fit the characters.
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