CANNES, France: A 13-year-old Syrian refugee boy became the star of the Cannes film festival Friday for his breathtaking performance in a Lebanese film many see as the likely winner of the Palme d’Or top prize.
Zain Al Rafeea, who has been working as a delivery boy in Beirut until recently — and who has only just learned to write his name — turns in a performance in “Capernaum” that critics said would melt the hardest of hearts.
“I and the total stranger sitting next to me were sniffling and sharing a packet of tissues” by the end, said the Hollywood Reporter’s Leslie Felperin.
And young Zain — who is small for his age — endeared himself still further by falling asleep at the press conference Friday afternoon, having stayed up late for the gala premiere the night before.
He said he now wants to be an actor and had been “spoiled” by the crew on the shoot.
Director Nadine Labaki took six months to make the odyssey through the lives of the poorest of the poor in the slums of the Lebanese capital using amateur actors.
Zain plays a boy of the same name who runs away from home after his desperate mother and father sell his 11-year-old sister into marriage for a few chickens.
Zain then takes his parents to court for having brought him into the world.
Labaki discovered the girl who plays his sister, Cedra Izam, selling chewing gum in the streets.
But it was Zain’s on-screen rapport with an unbearably cute baby Boluwatife Treasure Bankole — whose real-life Kenyan and Nigerian parents were rounded up during the shoot — that created the most cinematic magic.
In an astonishing sequence at the heart of the film, the boy is left to look after the breast-fed baby in a shanty town after its mother is picked up and imprisoned by the police.
In real life, the casting director stepped in to look after the infant in the absence of its parents.
“Capernaum” turns on the characters’ lack of papers, with Zain’s parents too poor to have registered his birth.
“Cinema is one of the most powerful weapons we have to draw attention to problems, it is one of our responsibilities as artists,” actor-director Labaki told AFP.
She said she found the idea for the film staring her in the face one night when she was driving home from a party.
“I stopped at a traffic light and saw a child half-asleep in the arms of his mother who was sitting on the tarmac begging.
“It became an obsession for me... I did more than three years of research. I was trying to understand how the system fails these kids,” she said.
“These kids are facing extreme neglect. A lot of the things I saw shocked me, children who were incredibly neglected, and I went into children’s prisons.
“You feel completely powerless. And that’s maybe why we turn away,” said Labaki, best-known for her far less gritty beauty parlour story, “Caramel.”
“I wanted to be in the head of these kids and understand what happens when you turn away and the kid goes around the corner and disappears.”
She said her 13-year-old lead — who has been working since he was 10 in the Mazraa district — was lucky to have loving parents. “When we started (shooting) he wasn’t going to school and faced a lot of hardships. He’s only now just learned to read and write his name. There are thousands of kids in his situation.”
Just like his character, Zain told reporters that he would like to live in Europe. And Labaki said there is a chance his refugee family might get asylum in Norway. “His future is uncertain. I hoped the film can give him another horizon,” she added.
The child got a 10-minute standing ovation after walking the red carpet for the premiere at Cannes late Thursday.
Critics raved over the film although some complained its storylines were too sprawling. “Prizes are almost a certainty,” said Variety.
“Young Rafeea is a revelation as the swaggering, foul-mouthed Zain, combining the requisite traits of wounded sensitivity with seasoned resilience that somehow never feels cliched,” said its critic Jay Weissberg.
Since the war in neighboring Syria broke out, tiny Lebanon has become home to a million Syrian refugees, more than half of whom live in extreme poverty, according to the UN.
With little end in sight to the seven-year civil war, Lebanese patience has been wearing thin, with refugees becoming the scapegoats for many of the country’s ills.
Syrian refugee boy is stand-out star of Cannes film festival
Syrian refugee boy is stand-out star of Cannes film festival
- Zain Al Rafeea, who has been working as a delivery boy in Beirut until recently — and who has only just learned to write his name — turns in a performance in “Capernaum” that critics said would melt the hardest of hearts.
- Director Nadine Labaki took six months to make the odyssey through the lives of the poorest of the poor, in the slums of the Lebanese capital, using amateur actors.
‘We’re rooted in the local community, but also global’ — inside AlUla Arts Festival
- The fifth edition of the festival began Jan. 16 and runs until Feb. 14
ALULA: The fifth AlUla Arts festival began last weekend. Until Feb. 14, the ancient oasis has become a living backdrop for bold land art, workshops, dance and musical performances inspired by the area’s majestic desert canyons and lush palm groves.
Sumantro Ghose, the arts and creative industries programming director, said: “We started in 2022 with 19,000 visitors. In 2025 (we had more than) 70,000. So we’re a growing festival. And what makes us unique is that we’re very rooted in the local community, but we’re also global.”
“We believe that AlUla, as a destination, was built by artists for artists,” Hamad Alhomiedan, director of arts and creative industries at the Royal Commission for AlUla, told Arab News. “That’s why we have this amazing program this year, which will be our largest art festival yet, and it’s basically focused on three cultural assets that we’re developing,” he continued. Those three assets are: AlJadidah Arts District, Wadi AlFann, and the upcoming Contemporary Art Museum of AlUla.
One of the highlights of the festival, once again, is Desert X AlUla, which runs until Feb. 28. The international site-specific contemporary art exhibition returns to AlUla for the fourth time, showcasing 11 installations by local, regional, and international artists — from Sara Abdu’s layering of poetry and geological strata to Héctor Zamora’s “Tar HyPar,” which transforms the valley into a musical instrument.
The exhibition, curated by Zoé Whitley and Wejdan Reda under the vision of artistic directors Neville Wakefield and Raneem Farsi, is inspired by the poetry of the late US-Lebanese writer and philosopher Kahlil Gibran, under the theme “Space Without Measure.”
“In the spirit of Gibran’s words, this edition of Desert X 2026 unfolds as an invitation to dream, to wander, and to connect with the landscape — not as something observed from a distance, but as something deeply felt. Here, space opens beyond measure, and it is from this shared invitation, the artists begin to speak, each in their own register, material and rhythm, offering personal yet deeply atoned responses to the landscape,” Reda said during the exhibit’s opening ceremony.
Elsewhere, the exhibition “Arduna” (‘our land’) ushers in the pre-opening of AlUla’s Contemporary Art Museum. Running from Feb. 1 to Apr. 15, the exhibit is a collaboration with Centre Pompidou and the French Agency for AlUla development and features contemporary art from the RCU’s collection alongside pieces from France’s Musée National d’Art Moderne, including works by Kandinsky and Picasso.
Alhomiedan said: “The community sits at the center of the development (of the Contemporary Art Museum). We did more than 30 focus groups, asking ‘What do you want the museum to look like? Do you know what a museum is?’ And ‘How do you imagine the museum can step out of the boundary of the wall and also reach to the houses and go inside these houses?’ Because we don’t believe a museum (to be) this physical space.”
The AlJadidah Arts District plays a major role in the festival, staging a number of initiatives, including newly commissioned artworks, workshops, exhibitions, film screenings, and musical performances. Saudi-French cultural institution Villa Hegra is hosting the photography exhibition “Not Deserted: AlUla’s Archives in Movement,” which features early 20th-century photographs by Tony André alongside an exhibition of cinematic images of desert landscapes by Saudi filmmaker and Villa Hegra resident Saad Tahaitah, while the AlUla Music Hub presents a number of concerts, ranging from Arabic, to jazz, to fusion. Cinema AlJadidah presents a curated series of art documentaries, feature films, and shorts, set in the open-air, and at ATHR Gallery, visitors can find works by Saudi-born artist Sara Abdu exploring architecture as memory.
Just across from ATHR Galley at Design Space AlUla is “Material Witness: Celebrating Design From Within,” an exhibition curated by Dominique Petit-Frère and Majedah Alduligan and artistically led by Ali Alghazzawi and Arnaud Murand, that highlights the connection between design and place and includes works by five participants in the AlUla Artist Residency’s 2025 design edition.
Alhomiedan said: “Every single one of these initiatives is inspired by the place and by memory and materials. Because if we don’t focus on that, then you can do this work anywhere else in the world.
“Focusing on where you are right now — like, the shadows of the palm groves or the palm trees, the different local plants that you can extract pigments from, local stones, different local fabrics, the local flora and fauna — this is how artists explore creativity through the place, memory, and community of AlUla.”
The festival positions art as a connective pillar between nature and heritage, aiming not only to revive the artistic practices exemplified in the ancient architectural marvels of the tombs in Hegra or the carefully carved statues uncovered in Dadan, but also to utilize their powerful history as proof of the region’s inherent gravitation towards art.
