I highly recommend the movie, Capernaum, which I saw at the Edinburgh International Film Festival the night before the FAWCO conference last March. I watched the movie in the original language (Arabic and Ampharic) with English subtitles. It contains strong language, references to child abuse and drug misuse.
Zain (Zain Al Rafeea) is a young boy living with his family in an impoverished Beirut neighborhood. Wise and street-smart beyond his years, Zain's resentment towards his parents builds and, following a series of tragic events, he finds himself compelled to sue them for bringing children into such a world.
In the background story, Zain stands trial: he sues his parents for having given birth to him, even though they cannot take care of him. He describes to the judge what he had to experience in his young life: he and his eight sisters could never go to school, and rarely had enough food. They had to work to raise money for the family. As his beloved sister, Sahar, menstruates for the first time, he warns her that their parents might send her away into a marriage. When the parents sell Sahar, at just 11 years old, to a man to marry her, Zain runs away from home.
He finds shelter in the slums of Beirut with a young mother, Rahil, from Ethiopia. However, she lives illegally in the country. When she is caught by the police, which Zain does not know, he has to survive with her baby, Yonas, alone. When he really does not know how to survive with the baby, he sells Yonas and runs to his parent's house to look for his birth certificate because he wants to leave the country as a refugee. But he learns that he does not have any papers.
Zain's indictment is a lawsuit against a whole society that allows such stories.
The movie won the Jury Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018. The director is Nadine Labaki who creates a "powerful and thought-provoking tale of hope, charting the journey of children on the edges of society" (Edinburgh International Film Festival Program).
Ulrike Naeumann
FAWCO Representative, Heidelberg IWC