While serving a five-year sentence for a violent crime, a 12-year-old boy sues his parents for neglect.
Being one of many children, Zain (Zain Al Rafeea), who is closest to his sister Sahar (Haita Cedra Izzam), tries to protect her from being married off before she hits puberty. Barely making ends meet, his parents Soud and Selim (Kaswar Al Haddad & Fadi Yousef) arrange for him to work for the landlord, Assaad (Nour El Husseini), making deliveries while they sell juice made from crushed opioid prescription pills. When he notices that Sahar has started to menstruate, he plots to take her and leave home. He packs their clothes, gathers up cash and leaves to find the bus. When he returns to get her, he is confronted with a fight between Sahar and the parents begging them not to make her leave to marry. For me, this is when the film takes off because after his sister is taken away, he decides to leave home, never to return.
Shortly after boarding the bus, an old man, in what appears to be a Spider-Man suit (Joseph Jimbanzian), sits down and they chat before he gets off at an amusement park. This propels Zain to get off and search for the man. In an attempt to find him he meets an Ethiopian refugee named Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw) and asks her where he can find the owner to ask for a job. Rahil eventually takes Zain home with her and her baby Yonas (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole), from then on they become family. Living in what seems to be a garage, Rahil leaves Zain home to care for her son while she is at work. It is revealed to us that Rahil has made some sort of arrangement for a fake ID with a man name Aspro (Alaa Chachnieh) who agrees to lower the fee if she will give him her child. When Rahil fails to come home one day, Zain sets off to find her with Yonas sitting in the back of a cart he made of pots and pans. With no luck, he runs into Aspro and tells him the situation. Aspro pretends to be concerned but just wants to take the baby, promising Zain that he will give him a good home and help him flee Beirut if he just brings back some form of ID. Meanwhile, Rahil has been arrested and is sitting in jail.
After days of struggling to care for himself and Yonas, Zain resorts to selling more opioid juice just to buy food. He makes a decent amount of money and hides it in a container within the home. One day he comes home to find that the door has been chained up by the owners with his money inside. This was such a pivotal moment in the film because up until this point, we feel like Zain is finally doing better. He has someone that cares for him and protects him and he has even formed a special bond with the baby. The moment you see the chains on the door, with all of their belongings thrown on the street, you feel such sadness and wonder where can he go from here.
Zain agrees to give the baby over to Aspro and return to his parents’ house to find any papers regarding his identity. Then the film takes us to another stream of emotions when we discover that his sister Sahar has died. Zain, filled with rage, runs off to find him with a knife and we cut to his arrest and court scene with his parents, which is the opening scene. Zain makes it clear to the judge that he wants to sue his parents for abuse and negligence and he wants them to stop having any more children.
What I love about this film the most is its energy. It is gritty, raw, honest and a lot of the moments are ugly but some of them are also beautiful. This story forces you to explore a kind of empathy and understanding for the characters that would otherwise seem impossible. This was probably one of the best foreign films I’ve seen this year. Such a real, emotionally-driven story not just about a kid trying to survive in his day to day life, but all of the characters were trying to survive and did only what they knew how. Director Nadine Labaki does an amazing job with every detail. There was not one moment where I felt lost or didn’t believe in the relationships. The cast was superb, natural and worked great as a whole. This was a wonderful experience.
Opens Friday, February 1st at the Angelika Film Centers in Dallas & Plano
