Review of Capernaum / كفرناحوم, directed by Nadine Labaki‎

Capernaum is one of those movies I’ve known about right since the beginning of when it began to appear on the film festival circuits. 2018 was when I began taking movies more seriously. I had just turned eighteen, had some money of my own, and moved to New York City.

I’d taken film classes for the first time, and began to appreciate the medium in a whole new way that hadn’t been granted to me before in terms of my education and experiences in the world. I didn’t get to watch Capernaum that year though because of my limited budget, as I had to pick and choose what kind of movies I watched in the NYC theaters due to a lack of money.

That said, it took me several years to watch this movie. I was wandering my local library and ended up in the foreign film section, where I found a DVD copy of the movie there in 2023.

I was shocked to see it there, and decided to check it out, as I had no plans that Friday to do anything. I watched the movie in one sitting, and was very interested in what it had to say overall.

Let’s begin the review!

Zain, after being kicked out of his house, seeks refuge with an Ethiopian immigrant on the streets.

Our main character in this movie is Zain, who is twelve and from the slums of Beirut, the capital city of Lebanon. We learn he’s about to serve a five year sentence in prison because he stabbed someone and called them a son of a bitch, but no one knows his birth date as his parents never bothered to get him a birth certificate when they had him.

Zain is brought to the court, as he wants to sue his parents for giving birth to him. The judge, incredulous at such a notion, asks him why he wants to sue, and he simply says “You had me.”

At the same time, the cops are going through migrant workers, and we learn of a young Ethiopian woman named Rahil.

This is the present day, but we need to go to the past to understand what’s happening.

Zain lives with his parents months before this with his seven siblings, and instead of getting an education, the kids resort to things on the street and crimes to get money. One of them is selling drugs to addicts, but Zain also is a delivery boy.

When his sister gets her period, he tries to hide it from their parents, as she will be married off to the landlord otherwise. They end up exchanging her for two chickens anyways, and Zain makes the executive decision to run away.

Zain follows a man dressed as Spider-Man to an amusement park, and he camps out there for the day.

There, he meets Rahil, who is a cleaner at the park. She decides to let him come live with her, having pity on his situation, as long as Zain takes care of her infant Yonas. Rahil is a migrant worker whose documents are about to expire, putting her in a precarious situation, as she doesn’t having the money to pay the forger for new ones.

The forger asks for her kid in exchange, but Rahil says no. When her documents do expire, she’s arrested by the authorities, and Yonas and Zain are left to fend for themselves.

Days go by, and Zain decides to take Yonas on for himself. He calls him his brother, and starts selling the drugs for money.

While on the streets, he meets a Syrian refugee girl named Maysoun, and she tells him Rahil’s forger is going to send her to Sweden. The forger says if Zain gives him Yonas, he will get Zain out there, and he needs ID. Zain goes home and asks for his ID, and his parents reveal they never registed him and kick him out.

But before they do that, they tell him his sister died, having had complications during her pregnancy.

Out of fury, Zain stabs the landlord and is sent to prison for five years. While there, he learns his mother is pregnant and will name the child Sahar, as his mother visits him to tell Zain that.

He tells her not to visit again, and, after hearing a television show is featuring child abuse, Zain tells the media what happened to him. In the present day, Zain tells the judge he wants his parents to stop having kids, as they cannot take care of them properly. He also exposes the forger, whose home is raided and Yonas is brought back to Rahil.

Zain finally gets his photograph taken for an ID, and the photographer tells him to smile, which he does. The movie then ends there.

Overall Thoughts

I can see how people called this poverty porn, but I think it provides an interesting glimpse into the real-life situation of many living in Lebanon and Beirut’s slums today.

Ethiopian migrants are a big problem, not just in Lebanon, as they come to these regions for work and then are forced out, leaving everything behind. Rahil wants a better life, but is unable to escape her circumstances, pulling her son into it in the process.

Zain is also forced to grow up way too quickly, putting him in some awful situations outside of home because of his circumstances. I’m glad I watched this movie in the end, and I want to see more of Nadine Labaki’s work in the future!

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