A TRAGIC WORLD WHERE KIDS GROW OLD TOO SOON
THERE has rightly been a great deal of fuss about Roma, the Netflix film that won a Bafta and is tipped for an Oscar on Sunday, which would make it the first foreign-language picture to win the movie industry’s greatest bauble.
But amid the hoopla, hardly anyone seems to have noticed that the list of films in this year’s Foreign Language category at the Academy Awards, which also includes Roma, is considerably classier than the list of nominees for Best Picture.
One of them is Capernaum, an intensely moving Lebanese drama about a small delivery boy living on his wits in frenetic, war-ravaged Beirut (Capernaum means chaos). This is Zain, wonderfully played by Zain Al Rafeea, a newcomer to acting and a Syrian refugee in real life.
Zain is 12 but looks no older than nine. He lives with his povertystricken parents and numerous
siblings, but is especially close to his sister, and is aghast when his father arranges to marry her off to a businessman. She is barely pubescent.
Cheeky, tough, resourceful and relentlessly foul-mouthed, Zain runs away from home, and befriends an Ethiopian cleaner who starts to rely on him to look after her own toddler while she is at work.
The irony is clear: Zain is much better at parenting than his own parents. In fact, the film is framed by a courtroom sequence in which Zain sues his mother and father for bringing him into this wretched world.
For some, Zain’s legal challenge adds a discordant note of fantasy to a film that otherwise pulsates with realism. But not for me. I loved every minute of this movie, which seems largely improvised, yet is brilliantly crafted by director and co-writer Nadine Labaki.
She probably won’t walk away from the Oscars with a gold statuette, but in most other years, she surely would.