A Wake-Up Call Through Film
Capernaum means “chaos” in French. It also indicates the doomed village in the Bible in the Galilee of northern Israel. There is a parallel between the ill-fated village in the Bible and the story presented in the 2018 Lebanese film Capernaum. The film’s young hero, Zain, is infuriated by the indignity and cruelty his parents have submitted their family to as a result of their poverty. They make money smuggling opioids to prison, (where Zain’s brother is) crushing the drugs, mixing them with water then dumping clothes into this solution to then dry up and absorb the drugs. To his horror, Zain’s parents then decide to sell his 11-year old sister to their landlord as a child bride. Zain runs away from his abusive home and files to sue his parents for giving him life in a corrupt system. The film illustrates just how painful being neglected as a child can be, and the impact the Syrian refugee crisis has had in not only Lebanon, but all over the world. The New York Times said it best, “‘Capernaum’ is Not Just a Film, but a Rallying Cry” (Aridi). Not only did the film receive a 15-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival for its brilliance, but it went on to win the Jury Prize, one of the many awards on the festival circuit. It secured a Golden Globe nomination for best-foreign language film, and an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature. While it did not win at those award shows, it is safe to say that Capernaum was not only heart-breaking, but impactful. The anger and suffering that we see Zain endure for most of the film is much of what many Americans have felt over the past couple of years when it comes to our own immigration dilemma.
What we see many of the characters endure throughout the film is only a small part of the severity and the consequences of the refugee crisis in the Middle East. The Syrian refugee crisis began in March 2011 when the government violently cracked down “on public demonstrations in support of a group of teenagers who were arrested for anti-government graffiti in the southern town of Daraa” (UNRefugees). The crisis has prevailed for almost 10 years and has spread all over the globe. Many countries, including the US, welcomed refugees with open arms, blankets and medical supplies, but after 2016, the US stopped helping, and began fighting this influx of people who needed help. According to the State Department, “near the end of President Obama’s term in 2016, the U.S. had resettled 15,479 Syrian refugees. In 2017, the country let in 3,024. Horrifyingly, the National Public Radio has stated that by April 2018, the United States had only taken in 11 Syrian refugees” (Romero). With the United States resettling an insufficient number of Syrian refugees in the past four years, our current president has left us with our own immigration crisis, and a government that is inching ever closer to the totalitarian states that we see in the Middle East.
The Syrian refugee crisis is now in its 10th year and is the largest refugee and displacement crisis of our time. There are about 5.6 million Syrians that are refugees and 6.2 million more people that are displaced within Syria. Capernaum showed only a fraction of what is present in the Middle East. The film’s director, Nadine Labaki in an interview with BBC, “recalls noticing a young child begging with his mother late one night on Beirut’s streets — the boy was too exhausted to stay awake, but too uneasy to rest. “I got so angry; how did we get to the point where we deprive a child of the most basic right, to close his eyes and sleep? Give me the strength to do something about it; what can I do?”” (Haider). Labaki, who also appears as Zain’s lawyer in a scene, was so fed up with the Syrian refugee crisis and children being denied their basic human rights by the government that is sworn to protect them, that she decided that it was time for something to really sink its teeth into the skin of the people who have power.
The world Zain lives in is filled with children who aren’t even happy about being alive because they see themselves as parasites as a system that won’t even allow them to have their basic rights. Labaki was almost in tears when she began creating the film. She describes one particular time when she met a child that told her, “I don’t know why I was born if no one is going to love me, if no one is going to kiss me before I go to sleep, if I’m going to be beaten up every day.” (Cooke). When Zain sues his parents, he is also suing the corrupt system he lives as a part of. A whole society that denies humans of the very things we need to survive. The story that is shown through this Lebanese masterpiece is something that can resonate with many Americans today because of our own struggle with a government that has made it its mission to purge any outsiders.
So why is what you see in Lebanon in Capernaum is so important when it comes to America’s own crisis? Well, put simply, we are facing one of the biggest immigration crises the United States has seen in the last century. But we are not only facing this disaster with Syria, but our very own neighbor. With our current president’s regime, kids are being stripped from their mother’s arms at the Mexican border, and a wall (or lack thereof) is being created to stop immigrants from finding freedom in the “land of the free”. The film is extremely appropriate for our current world climate when it comes to the refugee crisis in Syria because our own immigration crises in America make the message in the film even more understandable.
In the opening scene of the movie, we see an aerial view of Beirut’s crowded streets and makeshift dwellings that hold endless desperation. Kids running through the streets playing with sticks and tin cans or whatever they manage to find. No sight of the Mediterranean Sea and little visibility to the extreme pollution. There are families with newborn babies sprawled all over the crowded streets, but it’s better being displaced in Lebanon than being stuck in Syria. There are people living in squalor on the streets with tattered clothing and barely enough money to support their family because it is safer than being in Syria. Just as millions of civilians are living in these poor conditions in the Middle East, we are facing our own issues here in America. At the border of southern Texas, immigrants were put in cages and separated from their families. Children as young as 2 years old were being taken from their mother’s arms. While this atrocity happened in 2018, it is an ongoing crisis. David A. Graham wrote a piece in the Atlantic and noted that, “Inside an old warehouse in South Texas, hundreds of children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets” (Graham). The horrors that we witness in Syria and the Middle East are not that far from what we have going on on our soil.
The people in power in the United States, in Lebanon, all over the world for that matter, have the ability to do something, to enact change, yet there are very few who turn those words into action. The flaws we see in our government here, are flaws that are present in every government but with different examples. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Labaki made a very good point, “”It could be any child anywhere in the world,” she said, pointing out that there were a billion children living in such conditions. “It could be about children being separated from their parents at the Mexican border in America. Or Indian children working to feed families, Syrian children dying from chemical weapons. Or children being in that same situation in China. It’s universal.”” (Ritman). Capernaum does a magnificent job in portraying the impact the refugee crisis has had in the Middle East, and it even excels at pointing out the glitches in the American government when it comes to our own immigration crisis.
In Lebanon, the film had mixed impact because it reminded people of the faults in their government system. Some people were ashamed with what they saw. They knew what was going on but not to the extent that we see in the film. It created a huge movement, one for change. The other side was people who kept saying that this does not exist. That what was depicted in the film was not their country (Cooke). What the second half of Lebanon felt after witnessing the film is exactly what many Americans in power are saying about our government today. The same way the film produced mixed emotions for the people in Lebanon, is the same way the United States has approached its immigration mess. The government does not want to face the fact that we are in turmoil, and have been for many years now, with both Syrian and Mexican refugees. Nations such as Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon do not have the adequate resources to aid even a fourth of the millions displaced, as the United States could do so in a heartbeat. The more time the US chooses to ignore our ongoing immigration crisis, the bigger and more prevalent it will become. The anarchy illustrated in Capernaum is a wake-up call and a reminder for the American people that this problem we face with immigrants will only become worse and cannot be ignored.
Yes, it is an international film, so it may not be as known as ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ or ‘Forrest Gump’, but I believe it should. The tragic story of Zain, a 12 year-old-boy that sues his parents for giving him life in such a chaotic world, is one that should be watched by everyone. The film not only indicates how corrupt and unjust the system is when it comes to the Syrian refugee crisis in the Middle East, but it also points out the defects that we find in even the richest and most developed nations. In America we still face many of the same immigration issues we see in Lebanon. The United States’ response to the severity of the crisis (allowing fewer and fewer immigrants into America since 2016, or dismissing their very existence) accomplished absolutely nothing to alleviate the growing of our immigration crisis and the one in Syria. The film emphasizes what America could be left with if the call for change is not acted upon soon. It all comes down to the question of ‘why aren’t we seeing change’? The answer is simple. It is easy to just watch a movie about something, but it’s not easy to actually act and facilitate change. Capernaum is a magnificent part of cinema that presents a child’s perspective of a world that is filled with conflict and oppression. It shows that even though we have people in governments and systems all around the world that promise they are going to protect us, it is very easy for cruelty, injustice and selfishness to trump kindness and decency.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/movies/capernaum-review.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/movies/capernaum-nadine-labaki.html
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190207-capernaum-heart-wrenching-films-about-childhood
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/feb/20/capernaum-review-nadine-labaki-zain-al-rafeea
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/16/676553757/in-capernaum-the-chaos-of-lebanon-from-a-homeless-child-\s-perspective
https://www.unrefugees.org/news/syria-refugee-crisis-explained/
https://scholarship.shu.edu/pa/vol20/iss1/3/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/ceci-nest-pas-une-cage/563072/
