Capernaum

Capernaum (2018) opens in a courtroom. A boy of about twelve is suing his own parents, on the grounds that they brought him into the world. From there the film goes back and tells his life in the slums of Beirut. Nadine Labaki directed and cast non professionals. Zain Al Rafeea, who plays the lead, was a Syrian refugee living in a poor district of Beirut and contributed directly to the screenplay; some of the dialogue came out of his own experience. Labaki described her starting point plainly: she believed children were paying a very high price for our conflicts, our systems and our stupid decisions. The scale of the production was unusual. Filming took six months and produced 500 hours of footage. The first cut ran twelve hours and the editing team spent eighteen months bringing it to length. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2018 and received a fifteen minute standing ovation after its premiere. Against a four million dollar budget it grossed 68.6 million worldwide, the highest grossing Arabic language and Middle Eastern film ever made. The surprise came from China, where it took over 54 million dollars on the back of support on social media. It runs 126 minutes. Good for: social realism, performances by children, and Middle Eastern cinema. Less good for: the film shows poverty and the neglect of children directly and is hard to watch. The courtroom frame struck some critics as too contrived. The emotional effect is forced in places.