'Capernaum': Film Screening, Discussion

Join ASU professor Souad Ali for this film presentation and discussion of the 2018 Lebanese film "Capernaum," directed by Nadine Labaki.

It is the gritty story of 12-year-old Zain, hustling to stay alive and take care of others in the slums of Beirut. At the start of the film Zain is in prison for stabbing the man who married his 11-year-old sister and suing his parents for child neglect. The film chronicles how Zain came to this point and the difficulties of life "without papers." Zain's life intersects with an undocumented Ethiopian immigrant Rahil and her infant son, whom Zain cares for during the day while Rahil works and then on his own for a time after Rahil is arrested.

The film won the Jury Prize at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards. It is the highest-grossing Arabic and Middle-Eastern film of all time.

Professor Ali is head of Classics and Middle Eastern Studies in ASU's School of International Letters and Cultures and was a Fulbright Scholar at American University of Kuwait in 2009-2010. Ali is a executive director and past-president of the Sudan Studies Association of North America.

Ali is the author of the books Kuwaiti Women in Leadership Roles: Feminism, Islam, and Politics, A Religion, not A State and The Road to the Two Sudans.

 The event closes out CISA's spring 2023 Humanities Lecture Series; all three spring lectures hav explored the human condition through film.