A shocking film and an incredible fate
In 2018, a boy from the streets of Beirut, 14-year-old Zain al-Rafeea, moved the world of cinema. In fact, it carries the film Capernaum by Nadine Labaki, a touching and romantic social drama, which is inspired by her extraordinarily precarious life as a woman young Syrian refugee in the poor neighborhoods of the Lebanese capital. The film was recently added to Netflix and is currently ranked 5th in the Top 10 films in France.
The story of Capernaumwhich remains a fiction despite its connections with reality – the casting is essentially made up of non-professionals and the director is inspired by true events – is difficult.
In a poor neighborhood of Beirut, Zain lives among his struggling family and small-time street traffickers. Surrounded by seven brothers and sisters, without identification documents, he thinks he is 12 years old. When one of his 11-year-old sisters, Sahar, is sold to a fruit and vegetable seller for two chickens, he leaves their parents’ home and finds refuge with Rahil, an illegal Ethiopian housekeeper. Zain then becomes the babysitter of his one-year-old son, Yonas. But when one day Rahil doesn’t come home from work, he is forced to fend for himself with the little one…
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Awarded at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival
Story of a terrible general abandonment, filmed like a thriller, Capernaum wonderfully combines the codes of fiction with his documentary material. Young Zain al-Rafeea’s performance is dazzling, and all the more moving given that he could neither read nor write when filming began.
Capernaum tells the story of a child abandoned to himself, intelligent and resourceful but fueled by an unquenchable anger against adults, and in particular against his parents against whom he files a complaint for “having given birth to himIn his relationship with others, and with the very young Yonas, in a neighborhood of Beirut devastated by poverty, a heartbreaking exploration of the human condition unfolds.
Celebrated as much as criticized for the form novelistic what does this film draw from very real material, Capernaum was first several times at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival: Jury Prize, Ecumenical Prize and Citizenship Prize.
What happens to Zain al-Rafeea?
In 2018, Zain al-Rafeea’s family was granted political asylum in Norway, where they have settled. For the first time in his life, at the age of 14, Zain al-Rafeea went to school with his brothers and sisters. In 2021 he made a brief appearance in The Eternals by Chloé Zhao. And it is announced to the main cast of The sand castlenew film by Nadine Labaki, currently in post-production.
Source: Cine Serie
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