Capharnaum

This Lebanese film tells the story of Zayin, a young boy in a teeming family who after a fight with his parents finds himself on the streets, fending for himself. And as he makes connections with others (a single mother with a baby, a young Syrian refugee, the various vendors and people on the street), he gets exposed to more and more risks just to survive.

This has some great performances from the child actors and is a good delve into contemporary Beirut. But … it feels like child-poverty has almost become a genre, between this, “Florida Project”, “Shoplifters”,  the first half of "Lion" and the under-released “Tigers are not Afraid”. And while there’s undoubted excellence in these, it’s also … starting to become a somewhat familiar awards gambit. And in this case, there’s a couple of plot contrivances near the end, presumably largely to make sure that the audience goes home without slashing their wrists at the pure misery of the circumstances, that serve to compromise the film. Other versions of this genre have used magic realism to soften the edges here and there, and for me, that acknowledgement of the unlikelihood of some of the events works better than this, which tends to ask us to take the contrivances on face value. Still, this is powerful work that, in the moment, tends to work very effectively.