Capernaum

At long last I've seen all of the nominees for last year's Best Foreign Language Oscar (the award is now called Best International Feature) with Capernaum, from Lebanon. While not as good as Roma or Never Look Away (which would have got my vote) it's a poignant and hard-hitting story of the horrors of poverty.

Zain (played by the remarkable child actor, Zain Al Rafeea) is in juvenile detention. He is brought into court. Also brought into court are his parents. The judge asks him why he is in jail. "For stabbing a sonofabitch," he says frankly. And why is he in court? He wants to sue his parents. Why? For having him.

We are then told the story in flashback. Zain is an old-before-his-time kid, who understands the weaknesses of his parents. He is close to his sister, and urges her to keep her first period a secret, because he knows that this will indicate she is ready for sex, and thus could become a child bride. This horror comes true when she is essentially traded to a local merchant for two chickens to be his wife.

Zain, outraged, leaves home, and ends up in an unlikely arrangement with an Ethiopian woman (Yordanas Shiferaw) who is in the country illegally. While she goes to work he watches her baby. But when she is arrested, Zain has no idea where she is, and he and the baby are forced to take to the streets to find food or money.

The director is Nadine Labaki, who has a good eye for portraying the perils of living on the street. She also plays a small role as Zain's attorney. But what the film really boils down to is that the parents are the worst possible people you could imagine. They defend themselves, saying that the girl would be better off with her husband, but the film doesn't make much of an effort to humanize them. They are just awful.

Zain, on the other hand, has a bit of the superhuman in him. He speaks like an adult and has a confidence that borders on the unreal. He is twelve, but never has a moment of childish terror that a boy that age should have. If he had had reached some sort of breaking point it might have been more realistic.

These are things I'm thinking about after the film is over--while I was watching it I was engaged. I think about the childhood I had, which was free from concerns like hunger or where I was going to sleep that night, and realize how rare that is in this world. Everywhere there are children who go to bed hungry.

Labaki became the first Arab woman to be nominated in the category. There have been some strides in the Arab world about women making films, which is thankful for. While Capernaum (roughly translated it means "chaos") isn't a perfect film, it is an emotional vibrant one.