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.
OPINION: Saudi Arabia’s cultural continuum: from heritage to contemporary AlUla
- The director of arts & creative industries at the Royal Commission for AlUla writes about the Kingdom’s cultural growth
AlUla: Saudi Arabia’s relationship with culture isa long and rich. It doesn’t begin with modern museums or contemporary installations, but in the woven textiles of nomadic encampments, traditional jewellery and ceramics, and of course palm‑frond weaving traditions. For centuries, Saudi artisans have worked with materials drawn directly from their environment creating objects that are functional, but also expressions of identity and artistry.
Many of these traditions have been recognised internationally, with crafts such as Al-Sadu weaving inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list.
This grounding in landscapes, resources, and collective history means Saudi Arabia’s current cultural momentum is not sudden, but the natural result of decades — even centuries — of groundwork. From the preservation of heritage sites and, areas, some of which have been transformed into world-renowned art districts, to, the creation of institutions devoted to craft, the stage has been set for a moment where contemporary creativity can move forward with confidence, because it is deeply rooted.
AlUla, with its 7,000 years of human history, offers one of the clearest views into this continuum. Millennia-old inscriptions at Dadan and Jabal Ikmah stand alongside restored mudbrick homes in Old Town and UNESCO-listed Hegra. In the present, initiatives like Madrasat Addeera carry forward AlUla’s craft traditions through design residencies and material research. And, each winter, the AlUla Arts Festival knots these threads together, creating a season in which heritage and contemporary practice meet.
This year, that dialogue began in the open desert with Desert X AlUla 2026. Now in its fourth edition, the exhibition feels like the pinnacle of the current moment where contemporary art, heritage, and forward-thinking meet without boundaries. The theme of Desert X AlUla 2026 was “Space Without Measure,” inspired by the work of Lebanese-American artist and writer Kahlil Gibran[HA1] [MJ2] . The theme invited artists to respond to the horizons of AlUla’s landscape and interpret its wonder through their perspective.
Works by Saudi and international figures converse directly with nature: Mohammed Al-Saleem’s modernist sculptures bring in celestial-inspired geometry; Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons translates the colour of AlUla’s sunsets; Agnes Denes “Living Pyramid” turns the oasis into a vertical landscape of indigenous plants, . The 11 artists of this year’s edition were able to capture AlUla’s essence while creating monumental works that speak directly to our relationship with the environment.
In AlJadidah Arts District, “Material Witness: Celebrating Design From Within,” features heritage craft and material research from Madrasat Addeera alongside work by regional and international designers, showing how they translate heritage materials into contemporary forms.[HA3] [MJ4]
Music adds another element of vitality, filling the streets of AlJadidah Arts District, with performances supported by AlUla Music Hub, featuring local musicians.
The opening of “Arduna,” the first exhibition presented byof the AlUla Contemporary Art Museum, co-curated with France’s Centre Pompidou, adds another layer to this conversation. Featuring Saudi, regional, and international artists, from Picasso and Kandinsky to Etel Adnan, Ayman Zedani and Manal AlDowayan, the [HA5] [MJ6] exhibition signals the emergence of a global institution rooted in the heritage and environment of AlUla, placing local voices in context with world masters.
Each activation in this year’s AlUla Arts Festival is part of the same Saudi cultural continuum, . This is why the Kingdom’s cultural rise feels different from rapid developments elsewhere. The scale of cultural infrastructure investment is extraordinary, but its deeper strength lies in how that investment connects to living traditions and landscapes.
The journey is only accelerating. Rooted in heritage yet open to the world, the Kingdom’s cultural future is being shaped not by sudden inspiration, but by our traditions and history meeting the imagination and creative voices of our present.
