The series Tales from the Fatherland: Films by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, including Lingui, the Sacred Bonds, is showing on MUBI in many countries starting March 8, 2022.
Lingui, the Sacred Bonds
In Lingui, the Sacred Bonds, the new film by Chadian filmmaking great Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, a potentially life-threatening situation is met with compassion and quiet solidarity by an affirming community. These connections are necessary, particularly so for women to survive in a world that fails to see them as priority.
A teenage girl finds solace in her mother when she is kicked out of school for getting pregnant. They arrive at their decision soon enough: An abortion presents her only path out of poverty and pariah status. The problem is that abortion is illegal in Chad, not to mention frowned upon by the conservative dictates of the Muslim faith. To find a solution, both mother and daughter must rely on lingui, an altruistic philosophy that validates the individual’s right to exist and be assisted in times of trouble. An underground network of women emerges to provide support, away from the prying eyes of men. The strongly feminist focus of Lingui, the Sacred Bonds finds ways of celebrating the resilience of the women in this community as they snatch wins—big and small—from the jaws of patriarchy.
Lingui, the Sacred Bonds marks the first time in a career spanning almost thirty years that Haroun is making a feature with female protagonists. It isn’t the first time Haroun would depict lingui, or women supporting women on screen though.
Abouna
The surprise, violent climax of his 2013 film, GriGris which won the jury prize at Cannes, demonstrates a band of village women coming together to neutralize a threat to one of them. They then make a pact to never speak of the incident outside of themselves. In the quietly introspective Abouna (Our Father, 2002), a long-suffering mother, frustrated by the stresses of single-handedly raising two troublesome boys, takes her children to a Koranic school where a scholar attempts to instill in them some discipline. Lingui’s essence means that the individual makes up the community, which in turn serves the individual in times of need.
It isn’t too much of a stretch, then, to consider Haroun’s impressive filmography within the confines of the same philosophy of solidarity that lingui espouses. When Haroun returned to his native Chad—from his permanent home in Bordeaux—to shoot his debut feature, Bye Bye Africa, there was hardly any notable filmmaking activity in the country. A handful of documentaries and ethnographic shorts were being made but with Bye Bye Africa, Haroun is credited with making the country’s first feature-length film. A revealing exercise in autofiction in which Haroun mourns the decline of cinema culture in the country, Bye Bye Africa shot on video and released in 1999, kickstarted an unrivaled run that has made Haroun one of the two most prominent figures in contemporary African cinema, along with the Malian Abderrahmane Sissako, a friend and collaborator.
Two decades plus later and the film industry in Chad has still yet to take off despite Haroun’s repeated successes at the highest levels of world cinema. Haroun’s impact lies elsewhere, however. Chad, a landlocked country in central Africa is perhaps most famous for a protracted political crisis that has led to civil war and insurgency. With his film, Haroun has countered this imagery of destruction and desperation, employing the power of storytelling as far as it can go to present dignified, humanistic portrayals of his countrymen, women, and children. If the cinema of Chad, such as it were, exists at all today, it is mostly due to the heroic efforts of Haroun, who found means of funding his films in Europe long before the Chadian government structures eventually began to pitch in.
Bye Bye Africa
Which isn’t to say that Haroun ignores the realities on the ground in favor of more digestible flights of fancy preferred by commercially driven film industries. Embracing the role of the auteur in every sense, Haroun—whose inspirations fun the gamut from Robert Bresson to Abbas Kiarostami, Charlie Chaplin to Idrissa Ouedraogo—makes cinema that is steeped in neo-realism and the challenges of the times. His films avoid pedagogy even when they are mirroring the experiences of ordinary citizens. As such, films like the powerful Daratt (Dry Season, 2006) and the quietly reflective A Screaming Man (2010) are set within the backdrop of the country’s civil war.
Even with projects shot in France—the 2008 television comedy Sex, Okra and Salted Butter and the big screen drama A Season in France—Haroun maintains a preoccupation with portraying rounded depictions of Africans as they face issues like immigration and displacement in the western world.
Daratt opens in a post-war society with a radio announcement officially granting blanket amnesty to war criminals in a naive bid by the government to move on from the hostilities. Deciding that justice has not been served, an embittered elderly man who lost his son in the war hands over a pistol to his grandson charging him to find his father’s killer and avenge his memory. In A Screaming Man, the spiteful protagonist, facing the prospect of forced retirement, enlists his young adult son into the militia. In a scene that comes as close to any real time depiction of war as Haroun has managed, an entire town is forced to evacuate when the fighting arrives at their doorstep. Haroun films hordes of displaced, desperate people fleeing the life they can no longer have.
A Screaming Man
While these depictions of the realities of living in Chad are as traumatic as can be, Haroun is no miserabilist and presents them in his minimalist, matter-of-fact style. He is known to say as much—perhaps more—with ellipses as he does with words, letting the quiet power of small silences communicate several meanings. Even when his films have slender running times, Haroun favors the stillness of time and the vastness of space with striking visual compositions dedicated to the beauty and brutality of the Sahel region.
Born in Abéché, Chad, Haroun came to film as a young boy excited by an image of a Bollywood actress. Forced to flee his home country to Cameroon when the civil war broke out in the eighties, Haroun soon made his way to France solo where he put himself through film school doing odd jobs. He worked as a journalist before fully embracing the world of cinema.
Perhaps this experience pulling himself up by the bootstraps has given room to the inevitability of every Haroun film featuring a sequence quietly but clearly celebrating the dignity inherent in honest labor. The filmmaker riding through the streets on a motorbike, shooting documentary footage in ByeByeAfrica is just one example. But there is also the pivotal bakery in Daratt where the two protagonists engage in a battle of wills. This bakery practically takes on a life of its own as a significant secondary character. A Screaming Man’s protagonist is so attached to his job as a pool attendant that the film’s central conflict arises because this job is taken from him as the war encroaches closer. The understated joy of GriGris lies in watching the lead, a paralyzed dancer, perform not only for himself but also for his approving audience. When he is in need of more money as a result of a medical emergency, he turns to petrol smuggling. Honest work. The opening sequence of Lingui, the Sacred Bonds sees the heroine, a single mother at work making and hawking local stoves.
Haroun’s characters are ordinary people confronting heartbreakingly moral choices while finding their place in the cosmos. Two traumatized kids, putting their childhood on hold to search for an irresponsible father. A young man deciding if the satisfaction of revenge is enough to make up for generational damage. And a mother defying societal norms to ensure her daughter has a chance at life. Haroun’s stories have a laser-sharp focus on the personal, drawing familiar moments out of the grand canvas that his themes paint on. The story of a country lies in the complexity of the people and Haroun through his films celebrates the diverse beauty of Chadian people and culture as they interact and coexist within the political and social realities.
GriGris
Even when making a film like Lingui, the Sacred Bonds which is ostensibly about female protagonists, Haroun finds ways to inject his career-long interest in the complexities and complications of fatherhood—including the presence or absence of it—and the importance of the father figure within the family unit and larger society.
Lingui’s heroine, Amina, is considered a loose woman and shamed by her neighbors because she has no husband to protect her. The local imam wants to assume some of this responsibility, as a community father figure, but it is clear that he sees Amina not as a human being or equal, but something less than; a broken thing fallen from grace. He disapproves when she fails to cover her hair modestly or offers to shake his hand- he does not shake women. It is this outcome that Amina wants to protect her teenage daughter from at all costs when she resolves to get the abortion done by any means necessary.
The Chadian actor Youssouf Djaoro has been somewhat of a muse, playing the role of placeholder for the bulk of Haroun’s cinematic ruminations on the role and place of the father in contemporary Chadian society. Attuned to Haroun’s complex imaginations of flawed characters and his meditative approach to performances, Djaoro has played the father literally going to the war front to rescue his son in A Screaming Man. He has also portrayed the unlikely mentor for the revenge obsessed young man in Daratt, playing the character as a broken figure seeking some kind of absolution for his dishonorable past. In GriGris, Djaoro’s character comes to the aid of the protagonist as he attempts to save his stepfather. And in Lingui, the Sacred Bonds, he shows up as a predatory figure representing the duplicity of the patriarchy.
It can come across as one of those little ironies of life that a country of about 16 million people with no great cinematic tradition to speak of would produce one of the preeminent figures of cinema. He has been anointed the father of Chadian cinema, but Haroun is quick to stress that he lives in France and on account of a lack of local talent on ground, often flies in foreign collaborators when shooting in Chad. Training Chadian talent apparently can be tricky as they find it challenging to find work outside the intermittency of Haroun’s own films.
Haroun’s cinema has little use for Pan-Africanism, as he chooses to make the local global by drawing from the specificity of his experiences. Following his jury prize win for A Screaming Man at Cannes, Chad’s sole theater which had closed down during the civil war was reopened to screen the film. Haroun is the rare Chadian filmmaker to be screened at home where his films compete with Hollywood tentpoles and European football matches.
Lingui, the Sacred Bonds
In 2018, Haroun was appointed minister of culture, tourism and handicrafts in Chad but resigned abruptly after only a year in the position. He described the experience as a bitter one and sees himself contributing better to nation building as an artist rather than as a politician or administrator.
But even for a figure as outsized as Haroun, the challenges of being an African filmmaker endure. He is regularly invited to screen at the biggest film festivals in the world. He has won awards for his work abroad, where his films are often released theatrically and has single-handedly put Chad on the world cinema map. Outside of Chad and beyond elite film circles, Haroun is not quite the household name that he should be. His films are simply not being seen widely enough.
Theaters in Africa have not enjoyed the influence that they command elsewhere in the world because there are not enough of them. The collection of theaters that exist would much rather program guaranteed commercial hits from Hollywood ahead of independent auteur filmmaking. And prior to the onset of streaming, theatrical distribution deals hardly factor sub-Saharan Africa.
As a result, Haroun is often perceived in the continent as one of those filmmakers who make films for the West. The bulk of people who make these assumptions have hardly encountered his work of course. Because to do that would be to see something of themselves within his elegant, uncluttered frames. Such is the power and persuasion of the best of Haroun’s work. His cinema highlights both the plight and humanity of his people, elevating their specific drama to a sustained universal language.