WHY THIS LEBANESE DIRECTOR’S CANNES WIN IS A BIG DEAL

Jury Prize winner Nadine Labaki tells Chris Newbould how she hopes that ‘Capharnaum’ will highlight the plight of street children in poverty

Lebanese director Nadine Labaki made history last week as the first female Arab director to win a major prize in competition at Cannes, picking up the Jury Prize for her emotional story of the lives of Lebanon’s forgotten street kids, Capharnaum.

The win was a significant milestone on at least three counts. It put Arab cinema firmly centre stage on a global scale. It also struck a blow for women filmmakers in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Finally and most importantly, it helped to raise the profile of the world’s impoverished children – not just refugees, Labaki points out, but also kids who are born into poverty and simply have no record of their own existence.

Labaki is in no doubt which of these groups should take the greatest pride from the award. “It’s a win for all the people who are in the film, with their lives, all their sufferings and the problems they’ve been through,” she says.

Most of the film’s cast are street children Labaki met in Beirut during the two years she spent researching the film, and she is pleased to dedicate its success to them. “Really, everyone in the film is expressing their own situation and, for me, that’s the most significant victory. A few days ago these people didn’t exist, literally. Most of them don’t even have papers to prove their existence, so all of a sudden to shed light on them and their situation, everybody’s talking about them and recognising their talents, that’s a huge achievement.”

The film covers a deeply emotive topic, no doubt a part of the reason it received a 15-minute standing ovation from a tearful audience at its Cannes premiere last week, and Labaki is hopeful that audiences won’t forget what they have seen when they walk out of the theatre. “The aim is for the film not to just stop at the boundaries of being a film, but to go on and implement change,” she says. “That was always the aim of it. I might be a bit naive, but I think people will look at these people in a different way when they come out of the theatre. A lot of people have said to me since, ‘Do you know, I stopped and talked to one of them.’ To me, that’s the beginning of the change.

“Even if it’s naive, that’s what I’m hoping for. I want it to become more than just a film. I think sometimes we turn our heads and close our eyes because it’s too big a problem and we feel helpless, and I hope this film can be the start of a change to that.”

As for Arab cinema, Labaki admits that, with her own win and Ziad Doueiri’s latest Oscar nomination for

The Insult, we’re in a good place right now, and she says that some of that comes down to the region’s political significance. “There’s a lot of interest in cinema from this part of the world, because it’s almost like the future of the world is being decided in the Middle East right now,” the director asserts. “There are a lot of interesting things to talk about, and more and more filmmakers expressing their point of view. I think when you come from this part of the world you feel a certain responsibility because of where you come from, and you need to express yourself as an artist not just a filmmaker, and art cannot be dissociated from politics. We need alternative societies and alternative systems and we need art to help us think about all this. So it’s only normal that films from this part of the world are very interested in this sphere. We’re really on the map at the moment.”

Labaki is back in her native Lebanon now, alongside the film’s star, 12-year-old Syrian refugee Zain Al Raffeea, who accompanied the director on her Cannes trip. The director says her young colleague was rightly proud of the film’s success, although utterly unfazed by the glitz and glamour surrounding it, perhaps unsurprisingly given his background.

“He’s a tough kid; he’s seen so much in his life that all this is nothing,” she says. “He’s happy, of course, but it stops there. His life is not easy and that’s what we need to start looking at. All the kids in this film have very difficult lives and that’s what we need to start thinking about. How can this film really make a change in these kids’ lives?”

For that to happen, Labaki says, we all need to take notice. “I’m not the only one responsible for that, I can’t be,” she says. “It needs to be a collective effort. For all the good intentions I had, I wasn’t able to get them out of the streets. That’s all I was thinking of while I was there. I was in Cannes celebrating cinema and celebrating life, but I know their day wasn’t easy, and I couldn’t help feeling a bit guilty for being happy. You’re torn.

“‘How should I be feeling? What should I be feeling at this moment?’ The film asks these kind of questions, and I don’t know what will happen when the film is shown, but it needs to be more than a film and I really hope that’s what we see happen.”

Of course, Labaki may hope the film can help to act as a catalyst for change in the lives of the street kids and refugee children she met, but there’s no denying that the huge boost to her profile from winning at Cannes will also change her career.

Can we expect to see Labaki helming the next Marvel blockbuster? “It’s very tempting. Of course, I’ll see what Hollywood has to say,” she says. “I don’t think I’ll be doing a Marvel movie because it’s just not my thing, but if I see a script that I relate to, that fits in with the way I see the world, then why not? It all just depends on the script and what life is going to bring. Right now, everything is still just too overwhelming, I’m still absorbing what’s happening to me. There’s been no serious offers yet, but I’m just taking it all in and we’ll see what comes.”

There’s a lot of interest in cinema from this part of the world, because it’s almost like the future is being decided in the Middle East right now