Bye Bye Africa

1998, Chad/France, directed by Mahamat Saleh Haroun

Like Abderrahmane Sissako's La Vie sur terre, Mahamat Saleh Haroun's first feature narrates a journey home, from France to Chad in this case, and as in Sissako's film the line between truth and fiction is often rather blurred. Both directors play characters named after themselves, men who are reconnecting with family and the rhythms of life in their homelands, while the voiceover narration teases out some of the difficulties of life as an exile; both films even include quotations from the same writer, Aimé Césaire. Given the similarities of approach and tone, it's no surprise that Sissako ended up among the producers of Haroun's subsequent features, Abouna and Daratt.

Haroun's film has a multi-layered narrative in which he simultaneously depicts himself as a director making a film - entitled Bye Bye Africa - complete with casting calls and attempts to persuade producers to sign on to the enterprise, while also conducting apparently "real" interviews with people in Chad, with a particular focus on their experiences of cinema. Early in the film, Haroun's father comments to his son that "your films are for the whites", and that they aren't even distributed in Chad. This is a dilemma faced by almost all African filmmakers: faced with what seems the impossibility of showing their work on the African continent, they are sometimes seen to be unwilling, rather than unable, to do so, and Haroun's filmmaking efforts - in this film - seem designed to reverse that trend.

The interviews explore the destruction of the cinema exhibition industry in Chad, through a long civil war and the systematic lack of investment by overseas distributors - a lack of investment that essentially killed the theatrical business, since consumers were ultimately unwilling to suffer the dreadful projection conditions. There's a sadness around the memories of old movie theatres in N'Djamena - the Normandie, for instance - which are, these days, tumbledown or bullet-ridden, and when they operate at all show scratchy old prints of cheap action flicks.

The documentary aspects of the film succeed to a greater degree than the fictional story interwoven with the interviews. While that story serves as a means for Haroun to explore some of his own feelings about his status as a returning exile, there's a current of melodrama that proves distracting. When Haroun simply turns his camera loose, Bye Bye Africa captures, to a sometimes remarkable degree, the texture of N'Djamena life, the sounds and rhythms of the streets, while the interactions with family are understated and touching; Haroun chooses not, for instance, to depict an emotional reunion with his father, but cuts instead to a scene where the two men quietly drink tea together, the reunion enacted offscreen.

Two short films by Mahamat Saleh Haroun

Goï-goï, 1995, Chad

There's something of the films of Fanta Régina Nacro in this 1995 short, which evokes the terrible consequences of infidelity, as well as the matter-of-fact attitude of one woman in dealing with the aftermath. There's an extraordinary amount of action - and violence - in the film's brief running time, with Haroun making intelligent use of his limited resources (his methods of avoiding the need for extensive special effects are especially resourceful, while the impact of the deeds evoked is perhaps the greater for their indirect depiction). There's a tinge of Roald Dahl's short story Lamb to the Slaughter in the humorous ending, which Hitchcock might have appreciated.

B 400, 1997, France

Haroun's second short is both very brief and very slight, the tale - if it can be called that - of a young girl who locks herself out of her apartment building; the film seems to exist for its low-key punchline.

Abouna

2002, Chad, directed by Mahamat Saleh Haroun

Mahamat Saleh Haroun's Abouna plays like two different films: the first hour or so is a carefully realized portrait of the coming of age of two young boys, forced to look out for each other in the absence of a father, and with a mother increasingly overburdened by the simple demands of getting by. There's an abrupt shift in the final twenty minutes, however, as Haroun introduces a series of inter-related ellipses, interspersed with fades to black, with an accumulation of plot that threatens to overwhelm the film (the revelations come so fast that there's no opportunity for the characters to credibly react to life-altering developments).

Like his contemporary, and close colleague, Abderrahmane Sissako, Haroun is most interested in observing the delicate fabric of daily life; in his opening hour, he allows events to unfold at an unhurried pace, his camera attracted to bright patches of colour - an orange shirt, a book cover, a startling yellow dress. His mobile camera tracks across courtyards and behind beads, but also observes his characters in quiet moments, like a mother's tender embrace of her child, and gives a vivid sense of a particular neighborhood in N'Djamena. His use of music, too, is intensely evocative, and one brief shot evokes the wondrous opening segment of Nanni Moretti's Caro diario where that film's director-star weaves through the deserted streets of Rome on his Vespa, the soundtrack swelling as if the city belonged to him alone.