“Capernaum” is still making waves a year after its world premiere at Cannes Film Festival. The Lebanon-set drama took home the fest’s Jury Prize, and went on to receive an Oscar nod stateside, and now it’s become a record-breaking box office hit. “Capernaum” has “amassed a global haul in excess of $50 million,” The Hollywood Reporter writes. “The figure — which is still rising (it currently stands at $43.5 million in China) – makes ‘Capernaum’ the most successful Middle East film globally of all time.”
“It’s a big surprise for me,” Labaki said during Kering’s Women in Motion talk in Cannes today. “It’s very new. And it’s happening right now!”
“Capernaum” tells the story of a boy (Zain al Rafeea) who sues his parents for bringing him into a world of suffering,
“The most important thing I learned is that anything you need to do properly, you need to do it with freedom, and to take your time doing it,” Labaki told us of making “Capernaum.” “This is what I understood this time, because usually in my other films I was always a little bit rushed. I never researched so much. This took me four years of research,” she emphasized. “I created a huge network of people that would take me everywhere. I went to the most unfortunate places in Lebanon — to prisons, to detention centers, to the NGOs that deal with children, to courts.” She recalled, “I absorbed everything to have this thorough idea of what goes on. I didn’t want to feel like I was inventing it. So, during the process I didn’t interfere as a filmmaker. We shot in natural locations, real places, everything is real. There’s no set. Everything was shot where it happens. The décor and the clothes are real, and even the drawings on the walls of those apartments are real drawings done by real children who live in those places.”
Labaki, who made her directorial debut with 2007’s “Caramel,” is currently working on “a documentary about the street children in ‘Capernaum,’ including the kids that she cast, with the hope of pushing the matter beyond just the film,” the source details. “I want to explore how to really make a change,” said Labaki at the Cannes event. “The film has been seen and has started a debate. Now we need to work on the ground with the government to see what laws have been altered.”
The industry is taking note of “Capernaum’s” success — Labaki said that it’s opened doors, “including finding her an agent at CAA and seeing a steady flow of scripts sent her way.”
