Capernaum

There is a moment in Nadine Labaki’s CAPERNAUM which perfectly encapsulates the profound conundrum it presents.   Her face crumpled with premature age and agony, Saoud (Kawthar Al Haddad), makes a plea to a judge that will ultimately decide the fate of her family. We, the audience, feel as if she is imploring us directly: don’t judge me.  You haven’t walked a single step in my shoes, and couldn’t conceive of the cruelties that I long ago accepted as routine.   I live this way because my parents did; it’s all I know, and all I’m able to teach my children. Saoud and her husband, Selim (Fadi Kamel Youssef), are plaintiffs in a case brought against them by their own 12-year old son, Zain (Zain Al Rafeea).   Portrayed with a wrenching authenticity – in the truest sense, the child was plucked by the film-makers from the streets of Lebanon, himself a Syrian refugee – that requires both a delicately objective eye, and an unflinching moral confidence.    He is suing them for bringing him into the world, when they do not have the means to provide for his continued existence. Zain isn’t precocious; he has mentally aged beyond his tender years out of sheer necessity.  If not for his ingenious money making schemes (including dissolving prescription drugs in water to sell on the street as special ‘juice’) and quick hands, he would have long ago become a forgotten statistic.  In Sweden, “Children only die of natural causes,” a fellow juvenile ‘entrepreneur’ tells him, her dirt-smeared face brimming with hope. Zain runs away from home (a dilapidated, communal apartment building provided rent-free; we are never specifically told what arrangement the family has with their landlord, but it is undoubtedly exploitative) after the forced departure of his beloved sister, Sahar (Cedra Izam). Coltishly beautiful, she has just menstruated for the first time.  Zain immediately knows what this means.   She, however, is completely ignorant of what is happening to her body as her brother rushes to find sanitary products, temporarily padding her underwear with his t-shirt in order to hide the blood.   It is to no avail; she is bartered off to the landlord’s predatory relative, a terrified child bride. Furious, he strikes out on his own, wandering from street corner to street corner hoping to find a vendor who is in need of help.   He’s willing to do the most debasing, menial tasks if it means he can find respite from the parents who essentially trafficked his beloved younger sibling. The answer comes in the form of Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw, heart-breaking and compelling), an illegal refugee who is hiding her infant son, Yonas (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole gives the best performance by an infant perhaps ever committed to film)  – also without documentation – while trying to work any honest day’s labor as long as it’s not inside of a brothel.   Rahil offers Zain food and shelter in exchange for looking after Yonas. It is a less than ideal situation, Zain hardly appears strong enough to lift the baby, let alone feed and change him.  But this is a routine he now knows by rote, having done it for years with his own numerous siblings.   Somehow, he manages, whether it be by towing his cherubic companion on a stolen skateboard, or tying a chubby ankle to a bedpost. The people who populate the world to which Labaki gives us access are complex and authentic in a way we rarely see in film.  Her camera acts as a window through which we can observe a reality that continues, cyclically, in a system that chugs forward with no intention of changing.  Women will remain subservient to their husbands.  Daughters will be sold at the first glimpse of puberty.   Boys will be taught that it is their purpose in life to marry and reproduce, regardless of the resources available to them. Owing to its documentary-like narrative structure, CAPERNAUM feels rudderless at times; in a post-film Q&A, the film’s editor (Konstantin Bock) mentioned that the raw footage was originally assembled in a 10 hour cut.  That was whittled down to four, then three hours, before arriving at final 130 minutes version. The film’s ending is ultimately uplifting, but the journey there incurs a sustained emotional toll; the dynamic between Zain and Yonas reminds us of Isao Takahata’s brilliant but devastating Grave of the Fireflies—based on a semi-autobiographical short story by author Akiyuki Nosaka. The world we live in today still feels the effects of the war crimes Japan suffered during World War II; how we as a society choose to react to CAPERNAUM’s chronic cultural trauma has the potential to change the countless lives not yet lived.