Un homme qui crie

Title: Un homme qui crie (A screaming man)

Director: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

Writer: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

Year: 2010

Running time: 92 minutes

Country: France and Chad

Plot summary:

Present-day Chad. Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), sixty something, a former swimming champion, is pool attendant at a smart N'Djamena hotel. When the hotel gets taken over by new Chinese owners, he is forced to give up his job to his son Abdel (Diouc Koma). Terribly resentful, he feels socially humiliated. The country is in the throes of a civil war. Rebel forces are attacking the government. The authorities demand that the population contribute to the "war effort", giving money or volunteers old enough to fight off the assailants. The District Chief constantly harasses Adam for his contribution. But Adam is penniless; he only has his son....

Adam's and Abdel's relation is the main focus of the film's story, and according to the director it relates to modern day Chad: "Between the father and the son is the transportation of memory, genes, and culture. It’s particularly important here because men conduct the war in Chad. The unrest in Chad has lasted 40 years and it’s the father who has transmitted the culture of war to his son, because otherwise there is no reason for the son to get involved." Mahamat-Saleh Haroun intentionally resisted from going into detail about the civil war in Chad and politics: "The film recounts the point of view of this character and he hasn't got a position with the rebels or the government; to his life the two forces are abstract and so it would not matter if he was for the rebels or the government as this would not stop the war."

The film's title is a quotation from the poetry collection Return to My Native Land by Aimé Césaire. The full sentence is "A screaming man is not a dancing bear". Haroun says that the main character Adam is "screaming against the silence of God, it's not a scream against adversity".

© Text and photo: Wikipedia