The past 12 months have seen the theatrical releases of three extraordinary dramas powered by nonactors: Chloé Zhao’s lyrical contemporary western The Rider, starring horse trainer Brady Jandreau as a Native American cowboy on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation; Alfonso Cuarón’s sublime Roma, an homage to the strong women who reared him in 1970s Mexico City, with first-time actress Yalitza Aparicio carrying the movie as its lead; and now Nadine Labaki’s searing take on the global refugee crisis, Capernaum, in which the director is the only professional actor among a cast of hundreds who portray migrants in a Beirut slum. It is a sprawling epic that is also intimate; in its rawness, pathos, and intensity it recalls Italian neorealist films by Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, particularly the latter’s war trilogy—Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), and Germany Year Zero (1948)—works that also examine traumatized survivors rebuilding their lives amid ruins and ghosts of the past and that, also like Capernaum, employ a little melodrama to heighten impact.
A popular actress in her native Lebanon, Labaki has been lauded at the Cannes Film Festival since her 2007 writing-directing feature debut, Caramel, and her follow-up, Where Do We Go Now? (2011), which won two prizes at Cannes and remains Lebanon’s top-grossing Arabic-language film. At last May’s festival, Capernaum was nominated for the Palme d’Or and won three other awards, including the prestigious Jury Prize. (It was also nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.) But the film almost didn’t get made: with no stars, no firm shooting schedule, and no fixed locations—which consequently meant no concrete budget—the project initially wasn’t considered bankable. So Labaki’s husband, cowriter and composer Khaled Mouzanar, assumed producer duties, letting her film the way she wanted: shooting almost the entire screenplay chronologically while setting up scenes that were meticulously plotted, but whose dialogue was devised by the amateur actorsn who could readily follow her beats despite not having a copy of the script. She worked with only two cameramen and a boom operator so that no extraneous equipment would hamper anyone’s freedom of movement, and pushed for as many takes as she felt necessary, winding up with 520 hours of footage.
Directed by Nadine Labaki. In Arabic and Amharic with subtitles. R, 120 min. Fri 3/1-Thu 3/7, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11.
