Capernaum - city of hope

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Movie
German title Capernaum - city of hope
Original title Capharnaum
Country of production Lebanon
original language Arabic
Publishing year 2018
length 126 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
JMK 14
Rod
Director Nadine Labaki
script Nadine Labaki,
Jihad Hojeily ,
Michelle Keserwany ,
Georges Khabbaz ,
Khaled Mouzanar
production Michel Merkt ,
Khaled Mouzanar
music Khaled Mouzanar
camera Christopher Aoun
cut Konstantin Bock ,
Laure Gardette
occupation

Actor and director at the premiere for the film in Cannes

Capernaum - City of Hope (Original title: Capharnaüm or Arabic کفرناحوم, DMG Kafarnāḥūm ) is a 2018 Lebanese film . The social drama by director Nadine Labaki had its premiere on 17 May 2018 at the Cannes Film Festival , where it with 15-minute standing ovation and the jury award was rewarded. Numerous other awards followed and the nomination for best foreign language film at the Oscars 2019 . The German theatrical release was on January 17, 2019.

action

Only 12 years old, Zain is on trial for the second time. The first time he was the defendant after stabbing a man (a "son of a bitch," according to Zain). Now he is the accuser himself - his own parents. When asked why, he replies: "You gave birth to me."

The film tells its history in chronologically ordered flashbacks. Zain's family of eleven lives under the most adverse conditions in a confined space in a poor district of Beirut . The father denies the children school; instead, as street vendors, they have to contribute to the maintenance. As the only boy and elder at the same time, Zain has the greatest responsibility; this also includes work for the owner of their apartment, who waives the rent for them. Zain did not miss the fact that he also kept an eye on his favorite sister, 11-year-old Sahar. When she has her first rule , he clarifies and warns her. Yet what he fears is happening. He openly rebels against her marriage and secretly prepares to flee with her. When both fail, he runs away from home.

In the slums he finds refuge with Rahil from Ethiopia , who illegally works as a cleaning lady in an amusement park. She has a one year old son, Yonas, whom she secretly smuggles to work during the day to look after him. Now she gives him to Zain in care. However, one day she is arrested and does not return without being able to notify Zain. From now on he has to take care of himself and Yonas alone. The acquired social skills and experience help him with this. He even builds and puts aside money acquired through drug deals to be illegally smuggled into Sweden. The escape helper who promises to give Yonas to a good family also demands Zain's birth certificate. Zain secretly sneaks in at home, but is caught looking for it and immediately afterwards, as before, is insulted by his parents. When they mention a letter from the hospital, he pricks up his ears, fears the worst, and finally learns that his sister Sahar has died. Then he grabs a knife and rushes off.

The framework story is now told to the end. Indeed, Sahar died as a result of her early pregnancy. Her husband appears in a wheelchair in court and is not aware of any guilt. Zain's mother visits her son in custody and tells him that she is pregnant again herself. She hopes to appease him with this "gift of God", which is supposed to compensate for the loss suffered, but outrags him all the more. In court, Zain is tightening his first lawsuit and demanding that his parents forbid the birth of further children they do not care for. The legal proceedings are closed and filed.

Emergence

Director Nadine Labaki and her team worked on the film for more than six years. Four of them were researched among children from the slums and slums of Beirut , many of them street children and some of them from Syrian refugee families. Labaki learned from her mouth about extreme cases of neglect and abuse. The last question she asked the children was always: “Are you happy to be here; are you happy to be alive? ”Almost without exception, they answered no.

Almost all of the actors who appear in the film are laypeople. Some even play more or less themselves - especially the main actor Zain. At the age of eight he came to Lebanon from Syria with his parents and three siblings ; instead of attending school, he contributed to the family's livelihood through messenger jobs. He brought along the "rough body language", a characteristic of his character. “Zain is Zain” - and that's why it is called in the film as in real life - “what you see is what he is. That's not a play! ”Labaki therefore let him improvise a lot. In any case, the interaction between him, a twelve-year-old, and the toddler entrusted to him was something that could not be "staged" but only developed.

This contributed to the fact that the filming took six months to complete. It was also decided not to block any streets when shooting outside - in a part of Beirut that was “like a whole new world” even for the Lebanese cameraman Christopher Aoun, a kind of “hidden city, an underworld”. In places where the film crew reappeared it was sometimes dangerous; where they were already known, over time local residents got involved. Delays also arose because what the film showed happened in one way or another in the real life of those involved. The actress who played Rahil, who plays the Ethiopian mother, was arrested one day because of insufficient papers. The same happened to the family from which Rahil's son came. The fact that they managed to free them gave the crew new strength to continue working.

It took almost two more years to make the cut . 520 hours of raw film material was available. Since Labaki wanted the resulting takes to have an immediate impact on her, she brought in her German editor Konstantin Bock during the shoot and had him cut "quasi live". This resulted in a first 12-hour version. When the film was finished, they faded these out completely, started all over again in a conventional production office and cut a second version that was also 12 hours long. Both were ultimately incorporated into the final version.

The role that Labaki cut the most in the final version was her own. In itself, as in her first two feature films ( Caramel and Who knows, where? ), She had planned a leading role again, this time as Zain's lawyer, who was suing his parents. The fact that only a few sentences remained in the end was due to her research experience. There it had happened to her several times that she was indignant about mothers who left freezing and starving toddlers alone for days - and then had to admit, when she dealt with the women personally, that her condemnation had been presumptuous because she herself had their predicaments had never experienced. Therefore she finally felt her part was "the only lie" in the film and drew the appropriate consequences.

Film and reality

When asked whether Lebanon is not a better country than her film shows, Labaki replied: “I'm afraid the reality there is harder and even less bearable than it is described in Capernaum .” She does admit, that the acceptance of two million Syrian refugees , in view of the country's economic and political problems, is a sign of humanity and that there are idealists who welcome the refugees. On the other hand, many grievances had developed and created “real chaos” (which explains the title of the film, which means something like “disorder, confusion”). The grievance that particularly worries Labaki is the systematic corruption in the country, which, from her point of view, has led to what she calls “modern slavery ”.

Both families that are the focus of the film - the small family of the Ethiopian Rahil and the extended Syrian family Zains - shows them as victims of these conditions. Migrant workers are not allowed to have children in Lebanon; if they are discovered, either the whole family or “only” the children are threatened with repatriation. Those who still try to live and gain a foothold as families do so illegally , become vulnerable and easily become dependent. So too Rahil: She becomes pregnant and therefore terminates her employment; social decline and social isolation follow because she also has to hide her child; When she needs new papers, she has to have them forged, which means she is exposed to the arbitrariness of a stalker and, moreover , the temptation he creates with the offer to take her child as an object of exchange instead of the inflated price.

The same is true of the network of dependencies and exploitation in which Zain's family gets caught up against their “landlord”: living space (in the shabbiest form) against child labor plus married (child) wife plus possible further arbitrary demands at any time. The thought of going to school for the children, which would at least offer them the chance for integration and emancipation, is practically "forbidden" for the simple reason that it would make public what actually has to be kept secret. This is also the reason why Zain can not find his birth certificate at all . Another reason is that his parents couldn't finance it anyway (according to Labaki they currently have to raise 100 dollars) - a deficiency that can also lead Lebanese into the vicious circle - poverty creates isolation, which in turn creates new poverty - not escape.

How the system of corruption works is cynically revealed in the film, of all people, one of his profiteers, the trader Aspro, who assesses everything about the value of his goods, things like people, and the Rahil, with a view to her son, explains that a person without proof of identity is less important as a “ketchup bottle” that is “registered”. Later it is also Aspro who puts his request to Zain that he should obtain such a document for himself in the sentence: "Bring me proof that you are human." He will hardly have become aware of the ambiguity of his statement, in contrast to the viewer, who has long known that the boy has met the requirement in the figurative sense several times.

Another “vicious circle” that Labaki has shown in numerous studies is that 75% of children who experience “neglect, abuse, lack of affection, and physical violence” later on treat their own children the same way. With Zain, she has chosen a protagonist who belongs to a clear minority - in the film as in real life. The latter has now changed radically for the better for him and his family; With the help of the UN refugee agency , they were able to emigrate to Norway , where Zain attended school for the first time.

Labaki is far from satisfied with that, as interviews with her show. Nor does she want her film to be misunderstood as blame on her parents. “The court that I put the parents in front of in the film is all of us,” she says. “My film addresses the whole system that is leaving these children in the lurch.” Her main concern is fundamental, she promotes prevention programs and calls for non-negotiable rights for children too. “It is our declared goal to change laws.” To do this, she wants to use her film in a targeted manner, for example with special screenings for judges and employees of the Ministry of Justice and Social Affairs in Lebanon.

reception

In Labaki's homeland, according to editor Bock, the reactions to Capernaum are “mixed”. Sometimes people are surprised to be confronted with a hitherto unknown world in their own country, sometimes openly negative on the grounds that this would damage Lebanon's reputation. Cinematographer Aoun confirms this, but also reports on the film experience of a compatriot who overcame his initial distance when he became aware of the universal power of the story being told.

The largely renouncement of music and the fact that the camera moves "at eye level" with the children are praised in reviews. Aoun also points out a targeted “development”: At the beginning the children wanted to be shown smaller than at the end, which is why the camera is usually positioned lower than the baby in the final part, “so that one has the feeling that these two beings are whole alone, but also great in their world and in their perception ”.

A question that comes up in almost all reviews is whether the film succeeds in convincingly combining what seems difficult to reconcile: documentation and fiction ; on the one hand the intention to show hard reality unadorned, and on the other hand the attempt to tell a story bordering on the “wonderful”, in which sympathetic figures act, who may be wronged, but “actually” not allowed to happen to the extreme. There is a hint of skepticism when the film is described as a “mixture of hard, documentary realism and, yes, feel good movie”, or when, almost word for word, two reviewers strike a “very, very fine line between authentic drama and calculated“ poverty porn ” '" speak. The overall assessment of the criticism is clearly positive. The juries of various film festivals around the world, and even more so the visitors, rate this in the same way; this is indicated by the large number of audience awards won.

source rating
Rotten tomatoes
Metacritic

According to Rotten Tomatoes , the film convinced 82 percent of the critics (based on 65 reviews) by mid-February 2019, who gave an average rating of 7.4 out of 10 points. At Metacritic , the film received a Metascore of 75 out of 100 based on 31 reviews .

Awards (selection)

The film received the Jury Prize and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival . It was also nominated for the Golden Globe , the BAFTA Award and the Oscar for best foreign language film, but was subject to the Mexican drama Roma . The following is a selection of awards and nominations:

Alliance of Women Film Journalists 2019 Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film ( Nadine Labaki )
Nomination for the best female director (Nadine Labaki)
Asia Pacific Screen Awards 2019 Award for best director (Nadine Labaki)
Nomination for Best Actor ( Zain Al Rafeea )
British Academy Film Awards 2019 Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film (Nadine Labaki and Khaled Mouzanar)
British Independent Film Awards 2018 Nomination for Best International Independent Film (Nadine Labaki, Jihad Hojeily, Michelle Keserwani, Khaled Mouzanar and Michel Merkt)
Calgary International Film Festival 2018 Awarded the audience award (Nadine Labaki)
Received the Fan Favorite Award (Nadine Labaki)
César 2019 Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film (Nadine Labaki)
Chicago Film Critics Association 2018 Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film (Nadine Labaki and Khaled Mouzanar)
Critics' Choice Movie Awards 2019 Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film
The norske filmfestivalen 2018 Awarded the audience award (Nadine Labaki)
Festival Internacional de Cine de San Sebastián 2018 2nd place at the audience award (Nadine Labaki)
FICFA 2018 Award for Best Foreign Language Film (Nadine Labaki)
Awarded the audience award (Nadine Labaki)
Film Fest Gent 2018 Awarded the audience award (Nadine Labaki)
Antalya Film Festival 2018 Best Actor Award (Zain Al Rafeea)
Awarded the Young Jury Prize (Nadine Labaki)
Peace Prize of German Films - The Bridge 2019 Awarded the main prize (international) (Nadine Labaki)
Globes de Cristal Awards 2019 Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film (Nadine Labaki)
Golden Globe Awards 2019 Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film
International Film Festival Rotterdam 2019 Awarded the audience award (Nadine Labaki)
Cannes International Film Festival 2018 Awarded the Jury Prize (Nadine Labaki)
Awarded the Ecumenical Jury Prize (Nadine Labaki)
Stockholm International Film Festival 2018 Award for Best Screenplay (Nadine Labaki, Jihad Hojeily, Michelle Keserwani, Khaled Mouzanar and Georges Kabbaz)
Awarded the audience award (Nadine Labaki)
Leeds International Film Festival 2018 Awarded the audience award for the best feature film (Nadine Labaki)
Melbourne International Film Festival 2018 Awarded the audience award (Nadine Labaki)
Miami International Film Festival 2018 Awarded the audience award (Nadine Labaki)
Mill Valley Film Festival 2018 Awarded the audience award (Nadine Labaki)
Oscar 2019 Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film (Nadine Labaki)
San Diego Film Critics Society 2018 Runner-up in the Best Foreign Language Film category
São Paulo International Film Festival 2018 Awarded the audience award (Nadine Labaki)
Sarajevo Film Festival 2018 Awarded the audience award (Nadine Labaki)
St. Louis Film Critics Association 2018 Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film
St. Louis International Film Festival 2018 Award for best international film (Nadine Labaki)
Washington DC Area Film Critics Association 2018 Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film

Web links

Commons : Capernaum (film)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for Capernaum - City of Hope . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF; test number: 185405 / K). Template: FSK / maintenance / type not set and Par. 1 longer than 4 characters
  2. ↑ Age rating for Capernaum - City of Hope . Youth Media Commission .
  3. ↑ 'Capernaum' Trailer: Nadine Labaki's Cannes Jury Prize Winner Is a Moving Look at Childhood Poverty , IndieWire (accessed on January 18, 2019; English)
  4. ↑ Oscars: 'Capernaum' Lands Lebanon Back-to-Back Foreign-Language Nominations The Hollywood Reporter (accessed January 22, 2019; English)
  5. ↑ a b c d e Anke Sterneborg : Lament of a rough child . In: DIE ZEIT , January 17, 2019, accessed on February 13, 2019.
  6. ↑ a b c d e f Hannah Pilarczyk : "Are you happy to be alive?" . In: DER SPIEGEL , January 17, 2019, accessed on February 13, 2019.
  7. ^ A b c d e Paul Katzenberger: " Children are the first to pay for our wars". Interview with Nadine Labaki . In: SZ.de , January 18, 2019, accessed on February 16, 2019.
  8. ↑ a b c d e An odyssey through Beirut. Christopher Aoun and Konstantin Bock in conversation with Susanne Burg . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur , January 12, 2019, accessed on February 13, 2019.
  9. ↑ a b Antje Wessels : A boy sues his parents because they gave birth to him . In: Filmstarts , accessed on February 16, 2019.
  10. ↑ Beatrice Behn : The price of existence . In: Kinozeit , accessed on February 16, 2019.
  11. ↑ Capernaum at Rotten Tomatoes , accessed February 20, 2019
  12. ↑ Capernaum at Metacritic , accessed February 20, 2019
  13. ^ Alliance of Women Film Journalists , accessed February 14, 2019.
  14. ^ Asia Pacific Screen Awards , accessed February 14, 2019.
  15. ^ Asia Pacific Screen Awards , accessed February 14, 2019.
  16. ^ British Independent Film Awards , accessed February 14, 2019.
  17. ^ Calgary International Film Festival , accessed February 14, 2019.
  18. ↑ César , accessed February 23, 2019.
  19. ↑ Chicago Film Critics Association , accessed February 14, 2019.
  20. ↑ Critics' Choice Movie Awards , accessed February 14, 2019.
  21. ↑ Den norske filmfestivalen , accessed on February 14, 2019.
  22. ↑ Festival Internacional de Cine de San Sebastián , accessed on February 14, 2019.
  23. ↑ FICFA , accessed February 14, 2019.
  24. ^ Film Fest Gent , accessed on February 14, 2019.
  25. ↑ Antalya Film Festival , accessed on February 14, 2019.
  26. ^ Bernhard Wicki Memorial Fund, winner of the Peace Prize of German Films - Die Brücke 2019 , accessed on July 7, 2019.
  27. ↑ Globes de Cristal Awards , accessed February 14, 2019.
  28. ↑ Golden Globe Awards , accessed February 14, 2019.
  29. ↑ International Film Festival Rotterdam , accessed on February 14, 2019.
  30. ↑ Cannes International Film Festival , accessed February 14, 2019.
  31. ^ Stockholm International Film Festival , accessed February 14, 2019.
  32. ^ Stockholm International Film Festival , accessed February 14, 2019.
  33. ^ Leeds International Film Festival , accessed February 14, 2019.
  34. ↑ Melbourne International Film Festival , accessed February 14, 2019.
  35. ↑ Miami International Film Festival , accessed February 14, 2019.
  36. ^ Mill Valley Film Festival , accessed February 14, 2019.
  37. ↑ San Diego Film Critics Society ( Memento of the original from December 11, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sdfcs.org archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed on February 14, 2019.
  38. ^ São Paulo International Film Festival , accessed February 14, 2019.
  39. ↑ Sarajevo Film Festival , accessed February 14, 2019.
  40. ^ St. Louis Film Critics Association , accessed February 14, 2019.
  41. ^ St. Louis International Film Festival , accessed February 14, 2019.
  42. ^ Washington DC Area Film Critics Association , accessed February 14, 2019.