By Mónica Delgado

Nadine Labaki’s Capharnaüm and Sergei Dvortesevoy’s Aika, both in the Official Competition in Cannes, are Siamese films, both recurring to miserabilism and misery-porn, linked with contempt to their characters, something essential for their vision of drama. There’s no commotion or empathy for the spectator outside of cruelty or misery as an elements of melodrama for these directors: they will make you cry portraying beaten children, babies sold to mafias, or young girls raped and pregnant. The misery is seen as the only way to touch and achieve a response from the spectator which other mechanisms could never achieve.