Director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun: Africa’s Great Film Narrator – Culture

Heavy, golden sunlight covers N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, on the sand of the streets and the people going about their business. In the yard of her home, Amina slashes car tires to weave the materials into fire grates, which she sells on the street with a friend. The women listen to music, negotiate prices with buyers, and laugh. In the evening Amina is back in the yard with her fifteen-year-old daughter Maria. Amina senses that something is missing, but the girl doesn’t want to say what she has. Then the truth comes out: the daughter is pregnant, the school kicked her out.

“Lingui” is the name of the new film by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, the great filmmaker from Chad and one of the most important representatives of African cinema. His films have won awards at international festivals such as Venice and Cannes, where “Lingui” was in competition last year. The sun-drenched clarity of his storytelling brings social grievances to the fore – and African stories that are still greatly underrepresented in world cinema and have found a place there mainly thanks to Haroun’s work.

The daughter Maria does not want to keep her child under any circumstances, but abortion in Chad violates the laws of the state and religion. Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane), who wants to be a good Muslim, gets beside herself and beats up her daughter (Rihane Khalil Alio). But then she thinks better of it. She herself was once illegitimately pregnant with Maria, was expelled from school and rejected by her family. Now she wants to help her daughter, who wants to decide for herself on her fate and her body.

The word “lingui” denotes a form of social solidarity and connectedness between individuals, in this case between women, who oppose a patriarchal society. This is represented here by the strict imam of Amina’s mosque, a lascivious neighbor and a helpful but ineffective doctor.

Opposite them is a female network that supports Amina and her daughter in their search for an abortion: a nurse, a woman who secretly performs abortions, and Amina’s sister, whose husband wants to have their daughter genitally circumcised. Fortunately, Amina knows a woman who only fakes circumcisions, while her sister helps Amina financially.

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s career begins with a long exile in the West. In the 1980s, during the civil war, he left the former French colony and went to France, where he worked in journalism and studied film. He later returned to Chad in 1999 for his first feature film, “Bye Bye Africa” ​​- the first feature film ever produced in Chad. In the autofiction work, Haroun plays himself: a filmmaker who, after years abroad, returns home to make a film.

The fight for dignity in Africa is also inspired by Charlie Chaplin

The cinema also plays a central role in the wonderful “Abouna” from 2002, which can currently be seen in Germany on the Mubi streaming platform. Two boys are waiting for the return of their missing father, whom they think they have spotted in a movie one afternoon at the cinema; to be closer to him, they take the roll of film home with them. In front of the cinema there are posters of Jarmusch films, whose daydreaming rhythm Haroun adopts in “Abouna”, but also of Charles Chaplin. Like Chaplin, he warmly and lovingly portrays people from the lower fringe of society, their often comical misadventures and, above all, their struggles for dignity and freedom, which mother and daughter also have to fight out in “Lingui”.

Particularly impressive is Haroun’s “Hissein Habré. Une tragédie tchadienne”, which is also currently running on Mubi. The documentary is about coming to terms with the trauma from the tyranny of the dictator Hissein Habré from 1982 to 1990, from which the director fled to Europe at the time. Haroun has survivors and victims of the criminal president talk in front of the camera about their time in prison and torture by the secret police.

Open detailed view

Forty thousand people were murdered at that time. The film is about remembering and about a long fight for justice: Habré was only sentenced to life in prison in 2016. Above all, Haroun is interested in the coexistence of former victims and former perpetrators, in the possibility (or impossibility) of forgiveness and healing in a society.

Thanks to his successes in the West, Haroun served as culture minister in his home country for a time, but quickly left the job to make films. If lingui means a bond of solidarity between individuals, Haroun seems to feel equally responsible for Chad and its people, telling their stories, of social violence and grave political crises, but also of hope and optimism.

At the end of “Lingui” the women’s laughter returns, which seemed to have disappeared from the film after the first few minutes. But even in between there is no larmoyance here, just determination and beauty. The world shines in green, money and ocher gold, but none of this is decorative. The intense light and colors create a wafer-thin, ethereal hyper-reality that lays like a transparent veil over the harshness of social reality without obscuring it.

The softness and tenderness of the film, the closeness between the women, their embraces and concern for each other are reminiscent of the cinema of Berry Jenkins or Claire Denis: of the awareness of a love that surrounds everyone and does not reduce the – oppressed – bodies to their misery, but connects with each other. For Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, lingui also represents the healing powers of cinema.

lingui, France, Germany, Belgium, Chad 2021. – Director and script: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Camera: Mathieu Giombini. With Achouackh Abakar Souleymane, Rihane Khalil Alio. Déjà Vu film, 87 min. Theatrical release: April 14, 2022.