Capernaum: a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit

Capernaum is a gripping tale of living on the edge and struggling. It could also help sharpen your empathy muscles. The multi-award winning film is a hot tip for the Oscars, too. And you can catch it in Exeter.

Capernaum about a young boy without identity papers living in Lebanon and struggling to survive against stacked odds.

“Set in Lebanon and employing a cast comprised largely of actual refugees, rather than professional actors, Capernaum is a reminder of the fragility of our western lives and a call to action for our heads of state,” says the blurb.

It is a story of edges and extremes, surviving on the limits, under duress and a young boy suing his parents.

Peter Bradshaw in Guardian will give you a run-down of the story (a bit spoilery for our tastes, but there are you are).

Here’s the blurb again ‘Capernaum is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit -a battle cry for the forgotten, the unwanted and the lost that offers hope in the most unexpected of places’.

Here’s Peter Bradshaw again: “As for the title, it refers to the town on the Sea of Galilee where Jesus was supposed to have taught in the synagogue and healed the sick -the parallel between Jesus’s precocity and that of Zain is certainly ironic.”