Watching Lebanese director Nadine Labaki's new film "Capernaum" (2018) with two friends at the film forum in New York, at the Cannes Jury Award. A friend cried miserably; I tried my best to restrain and analyze it, and there was also a period where I couldn’t hold back tears (it seems to be the first time I appeared in a prison, I felt it, and I read the director’s interview to confirm that it was a real prison, a real prisoner, Many lonely children, many "illegal immigrants", probably this kind of real misery is sad).
Just like Shigee Hirokazu's "Nobody Knows" and "The Thief's Family", it is about the pain and trauma caused to children by poor families and parents who give birth to children but fail to take care of them or are unable to raise them. In Lebanon, because of years of war and the recent Syrian war-the vast majority of refugees have been received by developing countries, such as Lebanon and Turkey. In recent years, Lebanon has accepted more than one million Syrian refugees. The 12-year-old boy Zain who plays the protagonist Zain is a Syrian refugee. He has lived in Lebanon with his parents for eight years. Having slept in a real bed, the whole family slept on the ground-and I understand why the scenes of the whole family sleeping in a crowded sleep in the film are all from reality. Zain got the attention of a UNHCR because of this film, and his family moved to Norway, finally fell asleep in a real bed, and began to learn to read and write.
Thousands of children living in slums in Lebanon or Brazil or "separated from flesh and blood" on the US-Mexico border are not as lucky as Zain. They are still struggling with hunger, war, political system, street or parental violence. During her pregnancy, Labaki paid more attention to the poor children on the streets of Beirut, who were begging or working as child labor for a living. She spent three years researching, interviewing these street children, understanding their situation, and letting their real experience speak for themselves. She and the film crew found Zain on the street and Maysoun, a Syrian refugee girl. I also found Rahil, the illegal Ethiopian worker, and the real parents of the baby Yonas (she is actually a girl), and they were arrested just like in the movie after the filming.
Because they express their true experience and emotions, they have a lot of live performances. For example, when Zain ran after his sister Sahar, he suddenly ran, and the whole crew ran, so there is a large documentary-like violent shaking of the handheld cameraman. Lens. Live shooting, real people, all the authenticity that strives for the director's non-interference makes Labaki, who is a professional actor, think that his appearance in the film is inappropriate, and only gives a few short shots of himself who plays Zain's lawyer (still a bit of a sense of contradiction). The film was shot for six months, with 500 hours of material, 12 hours for the initial cut, and it took more than a year to cut to the current version for two hours, but I feel that there is still a possibility of cutting in the last half an hour. Labaki and her husband (also the composer of the film) Khaled Mouzanar mortgaged their house to get the funds to shoot the film. In the second half of the music, there is occasional suspicion of unrestrainedness, and less sensational power will be more powerful.
"Capernaum" is reminiscent of Iranian director Abbas’s "Close-up" in a courtroom structure; the amazing and heart-wrenching little boy about this child suffering adult crimes in the war is also reminiscent of Rossellini’s " Zero Year in Germany. "Capernaum" (Capernaum) was originally a place name in the Bible, which means "chaos" in Arabic. These most vulnerable children resented why they were taken to this adult-made hell... These "spectacles" that European and American audiences consider unbelievable are also criticized as "poverty porn" by some film critics. The director disagrees with this cynicism. , She said: “You should get out of the cafe where you write your criticism and go to the real world to see it” ---- Regrettably, most people who write criticism will not go to Beirut. "Wonders" are really everyday there. The real Zain knows that a little girl is forced to marry or be sold at the age of 12, and children are raped and abused... Such a movie does not require much advanced philosophy or skills, so there are painful themes, such real attention, and this is not a curiosity. The attitude is worth recommending. When many people demonize Syrian refugees from a European perspective, we can understand their suffering from the refugees’ "place of origin". However, few film critics in the United States, who acted as a catalyst for war disasters, mentioned this point and only interpreted it narrowly. Sell tragic stories for individuals.
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