Syrian refugee boy stand-out at Cannes

A 13-year-old Syrian refugee boy became the star of the Cannes film festival yesterday for his heartbreaking performance in a Lebanese film many see as the likely winner of the Palme d’Or top prize.

Zain Al Rafeea, who has been working as a delivery boy in Beirut until recently — and who has only just learned to write his name — turns in a performance in Capernaum that critics said would melt the hardest hearts.

“I and the total stranger sitting next to me were sniffling and sharing a packet of tissues” by the end, said the Hollywood Reporter’s Leslie Felperin.

Director Nadine Labaki took six months to shoot the odyssey through lives of the poorest of the poor in the slums of the Lebanese capital using amateur actors.

Zain plays a boy of the same name who runs away from home after his desperate mother and father sell his 11-year-old sister into marriage for a few chickens. Zain then takes his parents to court for having brought him into the world.

Labaki discovered the girl who plays his sister, Cedra Izam, selling chewing gum in the streets. But it was Zain’s on-screen rapport with an unbearably cute baby Boluwatife Treasure Bankole — whose real-life Ethiopian parents were temporarily deported during the shoot - that created the most cinematic magic.

In an astonishing sequence at the heart of the film, the boy is left to look after the breast-fed baby in a shanty town only for his mother to be picked up and imprisoned by the police. Capernaum turns on the characters’ lack of papers, with Zain’s parents too poor to have registered his birth.

Since the war in neighbouring Syria broke out, tiny Lebanon has become home to a million Syrian refugees, more than half of whom live in extreme poverty, according to the UN.

With little end in sight to the seven-year civil war, Lebanese patience has been wearing thin with refugees becoming the scapegoats for many of the country’s ills.