Capernaum: Child Parents
Still from film
Capernaum is a film about an 11 year-old boy (Zain) who, while serving a five year prison sentence, sues his parents for giving birth to him. He asks a judge to order that they have no more children. A life of neglect informs his conviction that those who can’t look after children, shouldn’t be allowed to bring them into the world.
A flashback reveals the events that led to Zain’s imprisonment. His mother and father are negligent and so Zain acts as a guardian to his younger sisters. In a touching scene he washes the bloody underwear of his 11 year-old sister Sahar as she experiences her first period which, if not concealed, will likely prelude her premature marriage. Eventually Zain runs away and meets Rahil who is working at a decrepit amusement park. Rahil is an Ethiopian refugee, illegally in Beirut with her infant son, Yonas. Zain moves in with Rahil and when she disappears, Zain again finds himself in a parenting role. Despite his youth, Zain instinctively steps into the shoes of absent parents.
Parenting is a unique responsibility that requires no qualification. Social services may appear when maltreatment is confirmed, but this depends on the country and an assessment often occurs after the child has been plunged into a precarious situation. Zain’s parents are abominable. They run drugs, they make their children work, and they manhandle them. However, through living on the streets caring for Yonas, Zain gets a dose of the ethical struggles that come with parenting in poverty.
The word capernaum is described by director Nadine Labaki, in an interview for the Globe and Mail, as chaos. It is derived from the Hebrew word Kfar Nahum ‘Nahum’s village’, an ancient town in Israel. Over the centuries the town was destroyed and rebuilt continuously. Capernaum came to mean a place with a disorderly accumulation of objects.
The film is set amongst this disorder. The slums are piled high with the inventive logic of the poor making do with the little that they have. A window makes a suitable door, an electrical wire provides a clothes line. Dali’s melting clock would hardly turn heads in this topsy turvy setting. The handheld camera work captures the chaos of Beirut with an urgent sense of scavenging through messy homes, dirty bins and crowds of people.
At times the film seems to prolong these daily scenes of squalor rather than progress the plot-line. A fridge being emptied becomes an event; rotten beans, mouldy pots, and sludgy remnants of decaying food leaves only ice and sugar to fill hungry bellies. However, the cumulation of these slower-paced scenes is deceptively disturbing. They don’t rely on the shock factor of starving children, like a World Vision ad, rather much of the barbarity and abuse in the film is implied. It’s not until the end, after seeing a plethora of mundane scenes of wretched daily life, that the emotional effectiveness of this strategy is felt. Subtle footage is more bearable for the viewer and allows for closer attention to be paid to each injustice, which ultimately provokes a greater empathy than raw ‘shock factor’ could have achieved.
Labaki establishes a hierarchy of victims of the refugee crisis. The children are left to fend for themselves in impossible circumstances. But the parents are victims of their refugee status too. They may be negligent, but are also without the means or prospects to support a family.
This is not simply a sad film. While it may lead to a collection of tears on the chin, these will also be the result of heart-warming moments. Zain doesn’t only fight for his own cause, but speaks as the voice for many children when he reproaches a judge, and all adults, for not protecting them. The film prompts admiration of a little boy’s unwavering resilience, and questions how many of the 631,000 children in Lebanon (estimated by Human Rights Watch) are forced also to live so far beyond the scope of childhood.