Capernaum Review

Nadine Labaki opens in court. Zain, a Beirut slum kid of about twelve who does not know his own birthday, is already serving five years for stabbing a man, and he is suing his parents for having him. The rest is flashback: the forged prescriptions his family turns into drugged laundry for prison inmates, the eleven-year-old sister married off for two chickens, and the day Zain runs away and is taken in by Rahil, an Ethiopian cleaner hiding an undocumented baby.

Zain Al Rafeea, a Syrian refugee living in Beirut's slums whose own experience shaped the dialogue, is astonishing: furious, funny and practical, a child doing an adult's arithmetic. The long stretch in which he keeps Rahil's son alive on his own, hauling him through the markets in a cooking pot tied to a skateboard, is the film at its best. Christopher Aoun's handheld camera stays close in the crush of the streets, and six months of shooting shows in how unrehearsed it feels.

The courtroom frame, with Labaki herself as Zain's lawyer, is the problem. It turns lived detail back into a thesis, and critics such as A.A. Dowd found the misery relentless. It still won the Jury Prize at Cannes and an Oscar nomination, and became the biggest Arabic-language box office hit on record at the time.