If it’s hope you seek in the new Lebanese film “Capernaum,” you have to look deeply. It lives mostly in the characters’ minute actions, which reveal kindness and care that long ago departed their eyes and demeanor. Look, for instance, to the pots and pans our pre-teen protagonist Zain has rigged into a rattling cart to dutifully haul around a baby that life has left in his lap.
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The larger world, by contrast, is bleak. It’s our world, after all, and Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki aimed to capture the harshest side of Beirut in excruciating detail. A well-known actress in the Middle East and the writer-director of human-interest comedies like “Caramel“ (2007) and “Where Do We Go Now?“ (2011), Labaki took the streets of her home city to shoot for six months on “Capernaum,” compiling a first cut of docu-realist footage that totaled around 12 hours. Though the actual film assuredly contains a two-act narrative structure and slightly mysterious framing device, Labaki says the bulk of her film is authentic to what “Capernaum’s” stars were doing before they were on “set”: walking some of Beirut’s roughest streets, trying to ensure their families’ next meal, and surviving without paperwork or legal immigration status.
“Capernaum” is an abjectly difficult movie to be sure (the title is Arabic for “chaos”) and one that raises sometimes perplexing questions about what’s real and what’s not, but international audiences have responded well ahead of its initial US release, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics, on Dec. 14. Earlier this month, Labaki’s third feature was nominated for a Golden Globe in the Best Foreign Language Film category.
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I spoke to Labaki earlier this week about how her young star (he’s Zain Alrafeea in real life) is dealing with the movie’s reception, how life and art intersected when one of the “Capernaum” actors was arrested during the shoot, and whether audiences have been able to empathize with Zain’s often objectionable parents.
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