DVD of the Week: “A Screaming Man"

The Chadian filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, whose most recent feature, “A Screaming Man,” from 2010, I discuss in this clip, lives in France. Alexandra Topping, in her article about the filmmaker in the Guardian earlier this year, writes that

Haroun left Chad in his 20s [in the nineteen-eighties], forced to flee with his parents during the civil war. Having managed to cross the Logone river between Chad and Cameroon, he made his way to France, working as a journalist in Bordeaux before arriving in Paris. He had left the country wounded, without any possessions, but kept one thing in his pocket: the address of a film school in Paris. “My story sounds like fiction, but it’s true,” he said. “It was like I was a homeless person, and this school is where I belonged.”

Civil war is the subject of “A Screaming Man,” in which two forms of upheaval—physical violence and economic change—converge to bring about a decent man’s moral downfall. The ultimate promise of better days held out by the movie is only emigration; no good, the movie suggests, can come of remaining on hand as catastrophe plays out. Yet, as Topping reports, with political stability in Chad, the cinematic situation has also improved—thanks largely to the success of this film, which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Festival and made Haroun—and cinema—central to Chadian culture. It’s a noteworthy interview. Haroun says,

Pan-Africanism is dead, and we must bury it. And if it is dead there is no African cinema. There is cinema in each country. We have to create a new utopia, where if one country can manage to create films, other countries can follow.”

Begin with the local and the personal, he seems to suggest, and one may reach the universal. Haroun’s direction itself—his canny sense of point of view, of what to suggest and not to show—is the art of looking thoughtfully, sensitively, and analytically at the world at hand; its politics are all the more powerful for their immediacy.