Film- Philosophy Conference 2025, Valletta, Malta, 23 - 25 Haziran 2025, (Yayınlanmadı)
“Would the Right to Have Rights Saved Zain?”
Capernaum is a 2018 award-winning film by Nadine Labaki. Zain is one of the older children in a large
family living in Lebanon. As he has neither a birth certificate nor an identity card, no one, including his family
and himself, knows his age and date of birth. Zain, estimated to be around 12 years old, and his siblings
live in the midst of poverty, child labor and crime. The real process that separated Zain from his family and
made his life more difficult began when his sister, who had just reached puberty, was forced to marry a man
20 years older than her. Zain now lives on the streets. The opening scene of the movie is quite revealing:
Zain is brought into a courtroom under arrest and files a lawsuit against his parents, blaming them for his
birth and asking them not to have any more children. One of the issues that arises in Zain's case, and
actually applies to the other children in the movie as well, is that of having rights. Although there are many
perspectives from which the movie can be evaluated, this article will focus on Hannah Arendt's right to have
rights. These children, who are deprived of almost every single one of the rights enumerated in the
Convention on the Rights of the Child, are pushed out of the system by their very existence. The right to have
rights, which Arendt uses to explain the events after the Second World War and the situation of the
stateless, is a metaphorical key that opens the way to all other rights. I will first discuss the nature of this
right and then explain how Z's life, and therefore the course of the movie, could have changed if he had had
the right to have rights.