Something to watch tonight: Thursday 2 November

Capharnaum (Labaki, 2018)

Māori+ pro­gram­mers con­tin­ue to impress me and I’m delighted to recom­mend a film that impressed the heck out of me when I saw it in 2019.

12-year-old Lebanese boy Zain (Zain Al Rafeea), in pris­on for stabbing the man who mar­ried and then murdered his 13-year-old sis­ter, is so dis­gus­ted by his feck­less par­ents that he sues them for bring­ing him into the world.

I reviewed Capharnaum for RNZ’s At the Movies at the time and the whole thing is worth read­ing (or listen­ing to) but here’s a use­ful extract:

I’ve just real­ised anoth­er thing that Capernaum reminded me of and that’s Dickens. Innocent chil­dren like Oliver Twist, caught up in the unscru­pu­lous affairs of inscrut­able adults. And you have to ask your­self, how bad must life be in Ethiopia if the option of inden­tured ser­vice to a middle-class Lebanese fam­ily is preferable?

Labaki’s pre­vi­ous two films have been pop­u­lar in fest­ivals like ours here in New Zealand. Her first film, Caramel in 2007 was an easy-going slice-of-life about sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions of Lebanese women around the beauty par­lour they fre­quent. In 2010, she made Where Do We Go Now?, a charm­ing fable about a vil­lage where Christians and Muslims live togeth­er in per­fect har­mony which was not helped by the intro­duc­tion of some unne­ces­sary music­al numbers.

But Capernaum is next level. Labaki has cap­tured some­thing awful – but some­thing awfully alive – with her alert, mobile, cam­era, her patience – it took six months of guided impro­visa­tion to shoot and two years to edit – and her abil­ity to work with dozens of non-professional act­ors to pro­duce some­thing like a Lebanese Ken Loach film.

Despite the vis­cer­al verisimil­it­ude, Capernaum is also a bit of a fantasy. Zain is a rep­res­ent­at­ive of the many mil­lions of chil­dren left to rot due to abuse, poverty, war and fam­ine. And the uplift­ing end­ing – though totally neces­sary for audi­ences to not walk straight into the sea after watch­ing it – also has a bit of a fantasy feel.

One of the chal­lenges track­ing down Capharnaum is that the title is spelt in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent ways. Try search­ing for Capernaum, Capharnaüm, or كفرناحوم‎.

Where can I find Capharnaum?

Aotearoa: Streaming on Māori+ or digit­al rent­al from AroVision

Australia & UK: Digital rental

US: Streaming on Starz

Further listening

This week’s edi­tion of RNZ National’s At the Movies is now avail­able online. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. Films fea­tured are Ms. Information, The Pigeon Tunnel and the double-feature of con­cert movies, The Eras Tour and Stop Making Sense.

It turns out that I’ve been spelling Siouxsie Wiles’ name wrong since forever.