We’ve been bombarded lately with this site of children in those, you know, very very difficult situations and you always have the feeling that they are paying the highest price for our faults.

~ Nadine Labaki, writer director

When life is neglectful and unkind, if you want to live, you will find a way out. Set in the small country of Lebanon, Nadine Labaki dramatizes the story of Zain (played by Syrian refugee Zain al Rafeea), a 12-year-old boy who sues his parents for the crime of birthing him and neglecting him and his sister, Sahar (played by Haita ‘Cedra’ Izzam).

Yordanos Shiferaw as Rahil

After tragedy strikes his sister and his parents do nothing to protect her, he flees from his home and survives by his wits in the streets of Beirut. On his journey, Rahil, an Ethiopian migrant worker (played by Yordanos Shiferaw) shelters him with her infant son, Yonas (played by Boluwatife Treasure Bankole). Eventually, Zain becomes the sole caretaker of Yonas after a series of events entrap his mother.

Taking a cue from the Italian neo-realism of Vittorio de Sica’s film The Bicycle Thief, Labaki plucked her actors from the streets of Beirut and produced a most dramatic and inspirational story of rebellious youth whose story leans to Francois Truffault’s The 400 Blows of the French New Wave era in cinema. Even the title of the film finds currency in literature and biblical history.

This is a word that has been used throughout history in French literature and English literature an even Arabic literature to signify chaos … to signify disorder. Originally it’s was a biblical village and it was sort of cursed by Jesus because of the chaos that was in it.

~ Nadine Labaki

Capernaum is riveting in its delivery. Zain inhabits every chaotic scene with an intensity that you will be hard pressed not to attempt to reach for the screen to carry him. It is one thing for Zain to manage his own life but when he assumes responsibility for Yonas, the story transforms into a heart-rending journey. Christopher Auon’s cinematography interprets the unbearable day-to-day, filming against the backdrop of a nimiety of issues: extreme poverty, slums, immigration and migrant workers, children and forced labor, the separation of children from families, child brides. Zain’s nit and grit fail to alleviate the distress; every dramatization of his daily life is overwhelming.

Yes. For you to be overwhelmed by all that because this is the reality and the reality is even more overwhelming than what you see is even more ugly than what you see in the film …

~ Nadine Labaki

Audiences at Cannes were overwhelmed and in such awe that the filmmaker and her team won not only the Grand Jury Prize at the festival; in addition, they received a post-screening 6 minute standing ovation plus more applause on their way out of the theater. A bit of trivia, the events the Ethiopian refugee Rahil experiences in the film happened to the actress who plays her, Yordanos Shiferaw, in real life three days later after the shoot.

Capernaum plays through February 21st at the Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

To Listen to the Audio Review of Capernaum @ 48:25 click here:

http://netnebraska.org/interactive-multimedia/other/friday-live-arts-soul-tassel-guitar-night-n150-more?fbclid=IwAR0OqlZyRsOqc9nt925ETgkRiUuCV2uKFme6m6iIqi13IKAU104R1svYmA0

The In Between is a film about three Palestinian Israeli women who navigate the oppressive and tumultuous waters of a patriarchal culture in predominantly Jewish Israel. In their navigation, each woman offers support to the other even in the knowledge that her support could have dire consequences. Written and directed by Maysaloun Hamoud, the In Between is a strong filmic pulse for the issues addressed by women across lines of race and ethnicity in today’s socio-cultural political climate.

Hamoud takes a hard line in his story, being sure to tap into the interior lives of each woman. Laila, played by Mouna Hawa, is a lawyer, who is no stranger to a party. She drinks and smokes and lets her thick curly hair run wild. Salma, played by Sana Jammelieh, adorns tattoos; she loves to deejay and to bartend. Then Nour, played by Shaden Kanboura, arrives at their apartment dressed in a hajib, ready to continue her studies in computer science. Laila and Salma baffle and intrigue her at the same time. She is the character walking across the bridge between her Muslim traditions and the free-style of her roommates. To the consternation of her fiancé, Wissam, played by Henry Andrawes, Nour finds herself caught between her promise to marry Wissam and her desire to stay with these two bold and brash women and practice her independence. The results of her decision are devastating but the bond between the women releases her to wholeness.

There is more, however. Salma reveals to her parents that she is a lesbian. They are livid and question how this could have happened to the family. Salma has to negotiate her love for family, her independence, and her sexual preference. Laila finds out, much to her disappointment, that her lover, Ziad, played by Mahmoud Shalaby, is more conservative in his beliefs about women than she had anticipated.

In Between is well cast, and each actress brings to her character a verisimilitude that strikes an honest chord with her character’s dilemma. Hamoud also is careful to depict a wave of parental emotion from disquietude to embarrassment to love and acceptance.

What Hamoud manages to bring out in his film is that female independence is complicated by myriad factors. It does not come as easy as one would expect. You either take it and accept the consequences or abandon it in lost hope. Even the decisions we make to ensure independence do not mean a life of euphoria and dances in a field of wildflowers; there can be honest misgivings, confusion, and ambivalence. What he gives each woman, though, is the gift of each other that does not waver as she walks in between.

The In Between plays through March 15 at the Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

Also playing through March 15 at the Ross is Fantastic Woman, Sebastian Lelio film about a woman who struggles to safeguard her chosen life after the death of her lover.

JR and Agnés Varda

Do you remember that trusty old photo album? You know that book with plastic pockets wherein you placed the photos you waited about a week for them to be developed? Do you remember the anticipation of driving up to the photomat or walking up to the counter in the drugstore and going through every photo all while the cashier waited patiently for you to pay for them? You didn’t care because as you leaned on the counter perusing each photo, certain emotions came over you. Those 3×5 cards bore witness to particular moments in your life. Those photos told a story.

The Town’s Postman

Street Artist JR and Agnés Varda feature the art of taking photos of faces and places and developing them on gigantic sheets of photo paper for all of their subjects to see in the moment. In their documentary entitled Faces and Places, Varda, a co-founder of French New Wave Cinema of the late 50s, and JR travel around the French countryside together in a van equipped with a camera seeking out the everyday ordinary. Daily life of working class people is the main aspect of this documentary, and Varda and JR invite audiences into the lively conversations each one has with them before the photo is taken. Why? Because these dialogues lay bare the histories of faces and places.

In the film, ordinary places and things such as crates in an industrial yard, fish at the market, feet and eyes and trains and water towers capture the attention of Varda and JR. One of the most amazing scenes are those of an area of abandoned row houses wherein the coal-mining families lived. These row houses are to be demolished but one lone resident on the row, Jeanne, refuses to leave. The retired miners come out to the area and tell of the dangers and hazards they endured as they worked the daily grind in the mines. Pictures are taken, then JR and his crew plaster these larger-than-life visuals of the miners and Jeanne, on the frontice piece of the brick homes. Autobiography along with the visual coalesce to offer testimony to a community once teeming with families, relatives, and friends. People once lived here.

The Coal Miners on Brick

I enjoyed seeing this young man and octogenarian finding solace in each other’s company and in their art. The strolls on the cold windy beaches, the conversations in the café, and the interactions with ordinary people, the patience, the comfort level JR and Agnés have with each other are refreshing, especially in this pop culture that is saturated with and salivates over youth.

Faces Places reminds us that the everyday ordinary of working-class people—from the postman to the truck driver to the goat farmer to the miner–all have stories to tell us if we take time to listen. But JR and Agnés privilege particular faces their documentary. No people of color are interviewed. The extent of JR’s and Agnés’s curiosity begins and ends, then, with French white citizens. On one excursion, an interracial couple is included in the project but the wife of African descent is silent. She sits without emotion as if to look into space as her husband chatters on and her children play around her. Why? Is there a political statement both filmmakers are trying to push to the viewing audience?

Watch for in-depth Film • Television • & More reviews & commentary.

In the meantime, catch a film, share the popcorn, feed your soul!

The Asset (Doug Jones)

Guillermo del Toro’s newest cinematic endeavor, The Shape of Water, entices audiences to suspend its disbelief and nestle into his fairytale love story between … well, a beauty and a beast. Film goers will recognize other references to films such as Splash, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, E.T., and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. I’d even go so far as to include Cinderella and The Elephant Man in the line-up of film references. In The Shape of Water, del Toro delves into the ‘what if’ of romance as he carefully dramatizes the fervent attraction of a lowly Cinderella-esque character to an amphibian creature called The Asset, played by Doug Jones. The Asset has been captured from the amazon in South America to be examined for its ability to endure extreme situations.

Elisa (Sally Hawkins) on her way to work

Sally Hawkins plays Elisa Esposito, a mute who lives alone above a movie theater and who is employed as a janitor at an underground science hub in Baltimore, Maryland. The time is 1962. Zelda, played by Octavia Spencer, is Elisa’s friend and confidante. Giles, played by Richard Jennings, is an unemployed gay advertising artist who also lives alone in the same apartment building as Elisa. He introduces us to our heroine as the princess without a voice. It is to Giles that Elisa reveals in sign language the reasons for her attraction to The Asset.

Elisa and Zelda labor in the isolated underground lab facility in chilly and bitter conditions. The scientists and lab technicians in their white coats shore up the echo as they walk the halls to their appointments. There is no joy in this environment; only a clipboard of statistics, computers spewing data, and, even more terrifying, creature hatred and abuse inhabit this world.

Elisa and her friend, Zelda (Octavia Spencer)

The United States is in a race against the Russians to develop its space program. The creature, or The Asset, is the key to the space program’s advancement.

Yet in Elisa’s world, love intervenes. Not only romantic love but love for your friends and associates who believe in those time honored civil rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The Shape of Water plays through February 8 at the Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.