Japanese Story

2003, Australia, directed by Sue Brooks

Like so many films set in the Australian outback, Japanese Story casts the wilderness as an unpredictable and challenging character in its own right, a vast expanse not to be taken lightly - and sometimes even a malevolent presence (it's a pattern that dates back at least to Picnic at Hanging Rock). There's a mystery in the depiction of the landscape from the film's opening credits, with aerial shots finding strange patterns and unexpected formations, emphasizing the alien nature of the expanse. The different responses to that space underline the kinds of cultural differences that are central to Sue Brooks's film.

Sandy, her Australian protagonist - played by Toni Collette, who is almost never off the screen - is a blunt-spoken woman who seems well-prepared for whatever the outback might throw at her, but she's essentially at the service of a Japanese businessman, Hiromitsu (Gotaro Tsunashima) who has his own distinct agenda, and the power dynamic compels her initially to follow his sometimes peremptory instructions.

The first part of the film mines the confrontation between the two for much humour at Sandy's expense, given her unerring tendency to trample on convention, a problem exacerbated by her annoyance at what she (correctly) perceives to be an insulting babysitting job; there's an especially funny running joke about business cards, which perplexes Sandy. The inevitable human connection that subsequently develops between these two people when they're shut together in a four-wheeled box is hard-won given the ill-will that has preceded it, but the transition also seems both natural and convincing, born of fellow-feeling in the face of the elements. Although the script perhaps telegraphs its emotions a little too much, there's also the sense that the two give each other a different way of looking at the landscape where their story takes place.

For a film that is so deeply concerned with the imaginative relationship to the landscape, it's striking that the Aboriginal population is almost completely absent, except in the form of a rock drawing and, later, a subordinate employee in a dusty outback town. At times, these two outsiders run the risk of romanticising their setting, while the camera's view of Hiromitsu occasionally feels as though there's a certain exoticization at work; however, there's also an unexpected and refreshing sexual candour, too, with a distinctly female gaze, that's more central to the film's purpose.

That candour is matched by the emotional rawness that follows an unexpected plot turn - Collette navigates the transition quite remarkably, her face conveying the depths of what we are seeing, and there's an intense physicality to her work that's draining to watch. The film swings almost completely on its axis during these scenes, revealing a frightening power in both the land and the human connection that's hitherto lurked just beneath the surface. The final sequences, scored with a musical refrain that lingers long after the film has concluded, reveal Sandy as far more complex than even she has imagined herself to be, and they carry with them a rich sense of another story about to begin.

Across the Pacific

1942, US, directed by John Huston (with Vincent Sherman)

Across the Pacific reunites director John Huston with a good portion of the cast of his first film, The Maltese Falcon, with Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet and Mary Astor on board a ship which makes the journey down the east coast of the US to the Panama Canal. Huston also makes use of the constantly shifting loyalties of his earlier film, where we're never quite sure who is fighting on which side, and when; everyone in the cast seems to have something to hide, and as the film moves towards its climax the revelations come thick and fast.
While there's much of the hard-bitten tone of The Maltese Falcon in the interactions between Bogart and Greenstreet - Bogart's character comes across as a cynical operator, available to the highest bidder, and blunt about what he wants - the scenes between Astor and Bogart are altogether different. There's banter here that wouldn't feel out of place in conversations between Katharine Hepburn and, well, anyone - Cary Grant, James Stewart, Spencer Tracy to name a few - and Bogart seems to enjoy the bang-bang give-and-take, though it has little of the more memorable depth of his exchanges with, say, Lauren Bacall.

The film never actually makes it to the Pacific at all, never mind across that particular ocean, with the conclusion, which feels like a 1940s template for a Bond film - these sequences were directed by Vincent Sherman after Huston headed off to war service - taking place on a plantation in Panama. The wartime flag-waving message is loud and clear in the final images, and the stakes are notably higher than in Bogart's earlier wartime effort All Through the Night, where the comic tone was easier to sustain when it was still mostly someone else's war.

Though much of the film takes place on a fairly cramped boat, Huston doesn't, to my mind, make full use of the claustrophobic potential of the setting, which often has the feel of a rather jolly cruise. Instead, the most atmospheric sequences in the film are in Panama's Japanese section, when Bogart drops into a movie-theatre for Japanese patrons: there's a wonderful escape scene behind the big screen, with the film projecting behind the action, while the entire Japanese quarter set is a fine example of Hollywood back-lot exoticism. Huston's stylistic skills also emerge in shot choices like those which focus on a hand counting out money, or Bogart's hand ominously emerging from the dark after a fight scene, or a telephone that lies on the ground in the aftermath of a death - an echo of the shot in The Maltese Falcon where Sam hears of the death of his partner.

The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On

1987, Japan, directed by Kazuo Hara

Kazuo Hara's documentary, his third feature, focuses on the extraordinary figure of Kenzo Okuzaki, a veteran of the Second World War who transformed himself into a one-man social movement committed to confronting post-war taboos that restrict discussion of Japan's role in the conflict, and more particularly the actions of the Emperor and military establishment. Indeed, Okuzaki appears to be unbound by almost all standard social conventions, having served time for murder years before the events chronicled in the film, and he is quick to resort to violence when it feels this to be necessary. Despite this, he's acutely aware that he is transgressing norms: he calls the police himself after one outburst and is almost absurdly polite in his dealings with various officers of the law yet does not rein himself in on subsequent occasions.

Hara gives us only the most fragmentary of information about Okuzaki in the film itself, following his activities but almost never supplying supplementary details (for that, it's very useful to turn to Jeffrey and Kenneth Ruoff's excellent short book about the film).* The film opens with one of Okuzaki's apparently quixotic enterprises - he drives around Tokyo broadcasting messages from a loud-hailer on his van, and is halted by police - and it's for the viewer to slowly assemble a story as we continue to follow him through Japan, where he confronts a variety of men who, years before, were complicit in, or at least aware of, a particular wartime scandal that's at the core of Okuzaki's interests.

Although Hara himself never appears onscreen, Okuzaki's actions are so intrusive - kicking an old man around, involving his own wife in acts of deception - that the film poses intriguing, and unresolved, questions about the filmmaker's own responsibility in setting at least some of the specific events in motion (although the actual actions are less troubling, the film raises some of the same issues of journalistic and human responsibility that swirled around Kevin Carter's famous - infamous? - photograph of a starving Sudanese girl apparently being stalked by a vulture). 


* Jeffrey and Kenneth Ruoff, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1998.

Chris Cagle hosted a discussion of the film at the Film of the Month Club; the film was selected and introduced by Girish Shambu.

The Visitor

2008, US, directed by Thomas McCarthy

Although the film provides an obvious interpretation, there are many ways to construe the eponymous visitor: as one of several guests, not all of them invited, in a New York apartment; as a visitor to the US; even as a visitor to one's own life when one becomes unmoored in the aftermath of a trauma. The story concerns a recently widowed academic, still at sea (and perhaps not only because of his grief), and his encounter with a young couple, both illegal immigrants.

While other films have tackled the world of illegal migrants with great skill - Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things is a fine recent example of the power dynamics that exist in so many immigant stories - Thomas McCarthy's film unfortunately feels extremely obvious (an example: the lead character's specialty is the economics of the developing world). As soon as the central characters meet, it's not hard to foresee the manner in which the grieving Walter (Richard Jenkins) is brought out of his shell by a happy-go-lucky, Syrian drummer (and his less relaxed Senegalese girlfriend): somewhere, Edward Said is rolling in his grave.

While that's by no means the only thread to the story, it's hard not to feel that the further developments, mostly regarding the immigration system, reinforce the liberal sense of the current US political direction without acknowledging that many of the systemic problems may have (substantially and even severely)worsened since 2001 but were hardly unknown prior to that date. At the show I attended, a woman yelled out, "Don't forget to vote next fall", as if a change of party would solve the problems depicted onscreen; if only it were that simple.

In the film's defence, while there are fundamental problems with the story there are moments of tremendous warmth and humour, skilfully played by Jenkins and the much less familiar supporting faces (Hiam Abbass is especially good, capturing a character caught between aspirations for her family and blunt reality), which, scene by scene, feel strikingly real and unforced.

The Last of the Mohicans

1992, US, directed by Michael Mann

Like so many of Michael Mann's films, The Last of the Mohicans depicts men at work, here engaged in the messy business of the the defence of their homes, as well as resistance to outside military rule. Although the film abandons the often claustrophobic confines of Thief and Manhunter for the forests of America in pre-revolutionary times, the locales are similarly fraught with danger; the woods are depicted as a place of sudden and even savage violence that can erupt at any moment to engulf the unwary.

From the opening scenes, it is clear that action as much as words will define this story: the film begins with a tremendous race through the forest, as viscerally exciting as any car pursuit, accompanied, as so often in Mann's films, by an intense and memorable score. That sequence and a bloody encounter which follows shortly thereafter deftly sketch in the three primary male characters (played by Daniel Day-Lewis, Russell Means and Eric Schweig). As if to underline the ways in which these men define their skills, one of the trio has an almost wordless part, while all three prefer to remain silent unless there's something of importance to share.

It's hard to avoid the thought that there's a occasionally a certain amount of romanticization at work here, with the depiction of a prelapsarian idyll into which outside forces intrude. However, as the film progresses Mann's depiction becomes more sophisticated, with the Native Americans far from monolithic, and capable, where it suits them, of forming political alliances to play the French and British off each other for their own ends. The film also depicts their exceptional tactical intelligence, in ways which frequently surprise the colonising forces, and strip bare the latter's tactics.
As elsewhere in Mann's work, the film turns most of all on different notions of honour, which overlap and sometimes conflict with one another. The main narrative thread is motivated by one kind of basic honorable action, that of protecting the apparently weak - not to mention extending essential notions of hospitality to strangers - and that simple action draws the central trio into a much more complex web of interlocking loyalties and betrayals, through which they are constantly called on to define their own essential values.

Emitaï

1971, Senegal, directed by Ousmane Sembène

Ousmane Sembène's first historical film, Emitaï focuses on the conscription of African soldiers into the French army during the Second World War, and resistance to that effort in the Casamance region of Senegal (the film was made around Ziguinchor, in Casamance, using many non-professionals). His later Camp de Thiaroye took up the story of soldiers returning from that war, and there's a striking parallel between the conclusions of the films, both of which are partly derived from actual events (the film has links with other entries in Sembène's filmography, with a key actor from La noire de... reappearing as a French officer).


Casamance is a culturally distinct part of Senegal, located south of Gambia and largely cut off from the rest of the country, and Sembène takes great care to depict the unique rhythms of Casamance agricultural life, from fishing to rice planting and coconut gathering, creating a rich portrait of the region (the scenes of tree climbing and field work are carefully integrated with the rest of the film; they don't simply feel like documentary trappings). Rice plays a key part in the film, for the French authorities seek to requisition much of the harvest for the war effort, prompting the villagers to conceal their stock in a beautifully filmed nighttime operation.


Though the tone could not be more different, I was struck by the way in which the idea of the rebellion of one small village against a seemingly omnipotent power has a resonance across cultures: while here the village chafes under French control, French popular mythology has adopted a figure like Astérix, whose village holds out against the Roman army, while a film like Goupi Mains Rouges to some degree dramatises the efforts of one clan to resist any outside interference during wartime (of course, these may also have been responses to the very particular emotions roused by the German occupation and associated accusations of collaboration or complicity).


As in many of Sembène's subsequent films, women represent the greatest source of strength in the African society depicted in Emitaï. They have a critical role in sustaining resistance to the colonial oppressors, and indeed they continue to hold firm after the village's male leaders have begun to discuss compromise; they even assume male cultural roles as needed when the men are either press-ganged or held under threat of force. The scenes of quiet resistance, with the women defiantly sitting in place in the sun, reveal both the women's power and the essential weakness of the colonial regime, reduced to such inhumane tactics. There's also an echo of Rossellini in the scenes where children observe the action, taking in the sometimes brutal attempts to impose control, but for the most part seemingly going about their own parallel business.


It's well known that Sembène turned to the cinema as a means to reach a wider audience, due to low literacy levels in many African countries, with his films consciously conceived as an alternative to Western film production (I don't agree entirely with Sembène's contention, however, that African audiences were served almost exclusively the dregs of the Western film industry (1); the cinema listing information from many West African countries doesn't bear that out, though I accept that he was making a rhetorical point). In the light of his own vision for the cinema, I'm very curious, as a consequence, to know how this film might have prompted a wider discussion about colonialism and African history when screened in Senegal, given the complications of using film as a historical tool, or as a means for historical education.


Whether the film is Emitai or Michael Collins or Gettysburg, it seems to me that the tremendous power of the filmed image, which can sometimes be difficult to dislodge (I recall many articles in the Irish press clarifying that the conclusion of Michael Collins was not necessarily the manner in which Michael Collins met his end), brings a great deal of responsibility if it is to be used as an educational tool. Watching this film in the absence of a wider discussion, I found it hard to disentangle the film's politics from its educational usefulness, though perhaps they are one and the same.


Robert Baum teases out some of the historical issues in Emitaï in his essay in the book Black and White in Color: African History on Screen (2), which to my mind underlines the need to cast Emitai in a wider context: in Baum's account, for instance, the film's depiction of local religious practice reinforces the kinds of visual clichés that we associate with the worst of Hollywood stereotyping (human skulls next to the elders, something that had no basis in local religious practice); that may well have been a reflection of Sembène's own general distrust of organised religion of any kind.


While I do have reservations, then, on the film's usefulness as a historical account, it's a powerful indictment of the petty and large humiliations experienced by the colonised population, and there's no missing the point that French soldiers were no less likely than their German counterparts to misbehave in the name of a uniform and a flag. Indeed, when the film depicts the transition from Pétain to de Gaulle, there's no perceptible difference to the villagers (the film compresses time in this regard, though it's ultimately quite an effective strategy), despite the rhetoric of liberation, and Sembène makes ironic use of the statues erected by France to the memory of African soldiers given French treatment of those same soldiers. It's also a highly unusual depiction of the actions of a collective hero: our attention is focused not on one person - with the exception of one startling closeup in the aftermath of an incident of violence - but rather on the communal defiance of the villagers as a whole.

(1) Film Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3, Spring 1973, pp. 36-42.
(2) Vivian Bickford-Smith and Richard Mendelsohn (eds), Black and White in Color: African History on Screen, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007.

Garage

2007, Ireland, directed by Lenny Abrahamson

Now that I live overseas, I'm no longer as aware of developments in Irish film, but Lenny Abrahamson's work in both Adam and Paul and Garage strikes me as something strikingly different in my native country's cinema; I'm intrigued, too, by what I've read of his 2007 television project Prosperity, scripted, like both of his feature films, by Mark O'Halloran. While Abrahamson is by no means the first filmmaker to take on subjects like urban poverty or rural disenchantment, his filmmaking style steers carefully around sentimentality, while he prefers a careful accumulation of details over the payoff of a more conventional narrative. He's also adept at crafting rounded portraits of people on the margins, and restoring some measure of humanity to them in the process: he seems to have a persistent desire to validate the experiences of those dealt a less fortunate hand by life, particularly against a backdrop of economic triumphalism in Ireland.

Abrahamson's storytelling method allows him to give an acute sense of the repetitive daily routines of Adam and Paul or, here, Josie (Pat Shortt), the sole full-time employee of a sad-sack petrol station somewhere in the midlands. Josie's a slow-witted man, though he has an agonising sense of his own limitations, and an desperate awareness of what is missing from his life - most obviously any sense of sustained companionship. As such, he has a tendency to cling to the smallest hints of friendship or tolerance, thus revealing the deep loneliness and - not unrelated - sexual frustration that often characterises small towns with few social outlets.

Abrahamson isn't interested in cliched portrayals of Irish life, refusing to depict the pub, for instance, as a place of refuge: instead, it's the theatre for some of Josie's most intense humiliations, whether at the hands of a local bully or, even more tellingly, through the complicity of the remainder of the patrons (the pub sequence in Adam and Paul was similarly fraught with tension). It's refreshing to see someone scratch well beneath the surface in this way - there's something of the sensibility of writers like William Trevor and, especially, John McGahern at work - and I wonder if, in Abrahamson's case, his clear-eyed depiction of Ireland is linked to the fact that he spent a number of years overseas, returning with something of an outsider's eye for detail.
For that matter, it's relative outsiders who are most sympathetic to Josie, whether in the form of a teenager who appears to be a fairly recent arrival in town, or an English truck-driver now locally resident who treats Josie with something approaching genuine warmth. The teenager is a part-time summer employee at the garage - though the establishment hardly needs an extra pair of hands, with so few customers - and he opens up a small new horizon for Josie in terms of social contact of a limited kind. The character also provides the trigger for the film's biggest plot development, which unfolds with spare Bressonian logic.
Even with some new window opening in his life, communication, though, is desperately difficult for Josie, as it is for many of the characters in the film. There's a uncomfortable scene where the great stage actor Tom Hickey unburdens himself, and Mark O'Halloran's script perfectly captures the way in which social niceties mask any real connection; there's no shortage of conversation, but it's often deeply unsatisfying.
As Josie, Pat Shortt is remarkable: he's an adept comic actor and a skilled social observer himself, including in his television show Killinaskully, which examines rural Ireland through a broadly satirical lens, but nothing in his previous work prepares you for the depth of his characterisation here. Abrahamson taps into Shortt's talent for physical performance, so that even when we first see Josie in a long shot, we're aware of the unique way in which he moves. That paunchy awkwardness is of a piece with Josie's way of bumping through the world, and while the overall tone is serious Abrahamson uses Shortt's physicality to craft some wonderful comic moments that enhance our sense of Josie's worldview (one sequence where he cleans up the aftermath of a teenage party is priceless).
Abrahamson seems as comfortable in a rural register as he has previously in urban settings, capturing down-at-heel locations like the garage in pitiless detail, but he's also capable of stunning painterly compositions, such as the shot which appears at the top of this post. Similarly, there's a gorgeous shot near the end that evokes a Constable painting, while the camera occasionally focuses in on the tiniest details of the landscape, as in the opening scenes of Adam and Paul (Irish people might be put in mind of the pastoral images that used to appear on the screen back when the national anthem concluded each night of television programming). His intention, however, is not to evoke a bucolic idyll; the often captivating settings serve instead as a counterpoint to the careful dissection of flawed people that inhabit that landscape, and perhaps a reminder that there's something more enduring that human frailty.

Syndromes and a Century

2006, Thailand/France, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatong Weerasethakul's fourth feature is preoccupied, in the best sense, with exploring the same stories again. That is most obvious here in the film's two-part structure, which occasionally replays entire sequences in new settings and from new perspectives - a medical diagnosis shown once from behind the patient's back, and later from behind the doctor's seat, for instance. In addition, Weerasethakul sometimes revisits scenes from earlier in his filmography, such as in the telling of a folk tale - subtly different in its conclusion - which was recounted in Tropical Malady.

I decided at the beginning of the year to be a little more systematic in my approach to several newer filmmakers, watching all of their work in a short space of time. It's a method that has proved particularly fruitful with Weerasethakul, for it has revealed - much more clearly than I think might have been the case with long gaps between viewings - many of the themes and aesthetic choices to which he returns time and again. In addition to sharing many of his earlier formal concerns, there's also an especially rich sense of human connection in this most recent work, perhaps because it is loosely inspired by the lives of his parents, both medical professionals.

As in his previous work, the director foregrounds the careful construction of atmosphere over narrative. Even when the settings appear, on the surface, to be busy urban locations there's often a languid, enveloping tone to individual scenes: there's a hint of bustle in scenes set in a big city hospital, but Weerasethakul searches out refuges from that more frenetic rhythm, in the hospital grounds or in a basement room where the doctors gather to relax and even continue their work, hidden from prying eyes.

Similarly, the meeting of tradition and modernity in contemporary Thailand is again a key motivator in this work. The shots of a statue of Buddha by a basketball court or set against a modern hospital structure exemplify this confrontation, which is also present in the warmly humorous account of a young monk who yearns for a career as a DJ, and whose visits to a clinic are a means of staying in touch with that ambition. On one occasion, he's serenaded by his dentist, prompting him to inquire whether he's there for a checkup or a concert; the monk, saffron-robed and barefoot, sits in a dentist's chair surrounded by the paraphernalia of a modern clinic.

An older monk features in the scenes that open the film's two different segments, and those sequences, which involve long medical histories - similar scenes in the offices of doctors and veterinarians recur frequently in Weerasethakul's films - underline the fact that there is more than one way of approaching medical problems: while the Western-style doctors attempt to provide a satisfactory diagnosis for the monk, the older man makes his own silent diagnosis of the doctors' needs and hands over herbs for a healing tea near the end of each interview. The idea of two parallel methods of perceiving medical issues is similar to the way in which Weerasethakul illustrates two entirely different ways of seeing the world in both Mysterious Object at Noon and Tropical Malady, which blend realism with fantasy, blurring the line between the apparently "real" world and its mythical parallel.

Weerasethakul creates careful visual distinctions between the first and second halves of his film: while the first segment relies almost exclusively on medium shots, the second opens with an unexpected close-up, as if we're now primed to see a greater degree of detail in the scenes that we experience anew. Those repetitions are strikingly effective, compelling us to focus on the subtleties of his characters rather than simply sweeping us along in a conventional narrative. There's a tenderness to his depiction of both the patients and the young doctors, who are often endearingly tentative and shy, that has become a more important presence in his work as his career has progressed; there's a wonderful sense of watching real, fully imagined characters here, and there's a refreshing optimism in the director's generous characterisations.

The film ends with an open-air exercise session, a scene that refers back to Tropical Malady and which also recalls the conclusion of Claire Denis's Beau travail - except that Denis Lavant's solitary, improvised dancing is replaced by a collectively choreographed experience. It's as mesmerizingly strange an ending, however, as in that earlier film, apparently unrelated to what has preceded it, and yet of a piece with Weerasethakul's wonderful eye for the unexpected composition and incongruous juxtaposition.

All Through the Night

1942, US, directed by Vincent Sherman

A Bogart vehicle that was released a month after Pearl Harbor, All Through the Night is an uneasy mix of comedy and wartime murder centered on an unlikely confrontation between a cell of Nazi "fifth columnists" in New York, and a soft-hearted gangster, "Gloves" Donahue (Bogart), and his crew. The opening of the film is all breezy banter - with comics like Phil Silvers and Jackie Gleason on the fringes - but once the plot kicks into motion things get surprisingly brutal: there's a sequence where a body falls from an elevator that is startlingly blunt, the corpse thudding to an unmistakable halt at ground level.
The problem is that director Vincent Sherman doesn't know how to handle the transitions, navigating uneasily between the two different modes, which sometimes clash quite jarringly, especially in a fight sequence in Central Park where Donahue's gang pratfalls while the Nazis remain deadly serious. A more recent director like Bong Joon-ho might make something fruitful out of these tonal shifts - though he probably wouldn't have gotten the job in old-time Hollywood - but in Sherman's hands they feel awkward, as if he's never able to make up his mind how to handle his material. The same uncertainty characterises a scene near the end that's awkwardly reminiscent of the climax of Fritz Lang's M, the deadly serious "trial", but a belabored back-and-forth between Donhaue and his right-hand man in mock German undermines the drama of the setting,
It doesn't help that the script is generally weak, with little ear for dialogue; the film is filled with clanging lines like "Boys, we're on the right track" and "This might be a clue", especially as the plot becomes more obviously problematic in the second half. In the end, the film's propaganda value comes to the fore, with Yankee ingenuity continually thwarting the bad guys (minimal reference is made, of course, to the fact that the war was already several years old for some other countries), though it's perhaps worth noting that Gloves is able to call on a gang that includes Jewish and Asian members (the film's one black character gets short shrift).
Early on, Sherman stages several scenes rather well, particularly a shot through a kitchen where a slice of cheescake is being prepared, or another in a bakery where the camera moves in tight to the actors, but things quickly become much more predictable; you wonder if someone else filmed these shots, since they're out of character with the rest of the picture. Most of the film's energy stems instead from its fine Warner Brothers' cast, whether it's the starring roles featuring Bogart, Kaaren Verne and Conrad Veidt (especially good), to top-notch supporting work from actors like William Demarest, Peter Lorre, Frank McHugh and Jane Darwell (several of the cast, and others not named here, were of course refugees from the rising tide of Nazism).

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.