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"We don't need protection." Mubi has unveiled an official US trailer for the African drama Lingui: The Sacred Bonds, which originally premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, playing in the main competition. The film is the latest by an award-winning filmmaker from Chad named Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, best known for his other films Our Father, Dry Season, A Screaming Man, Grigris, and A Season in France. Amina, a practicing Muslim, lives with her daughter, 15-year-old Maria. When Amina learns Maria is pregnant and wants to abort the child, they face an impossible situation in a country where abortion is legally and morally condemned. The cast features Achouackh Abakar, Rihane Khalil Alio, Youssouf Djaoro, Briya Gomdigue, and Hadje Fatime N'Goua. This earned great reviews at festivals, saying "Haroun takes a quiet, meditative approach to storytelling." If you're into slow cinema this is for you. Here's the US trailer (+ poster...

These are the submissions for the international film Oscar by country. The deadline for entries was Nov. 1. A shortlist of 15 films will be announced Dec. 21 and the nominations will come out Feb 8. The 94th Academy Awards will take place on March 27 at the Dolby Theatre. The Academy has not yet released a final list of entries; Variety compiled this list from individual country’s announcements.

Albania

Two Lions Heading to Venice

Dir. Jonid Jorji

Key cast: Vasjan Lami, Alessandra Bonarotta

Logline: A pair of filmmakers heading to the Venice festival are sidetracked from their destination after meeting two adult film actors.

Prodco: Bajo Films

Algeria

Heliopolis

Dir. Djaafar Gacem

Key cast: Souhila Mallem, Mehdi Ramdani, Cesar Duminil

Logline: True story of an uprising in the Algerian town of Guelma that was violently put down by the colonial French rulers.

Prodco: Hewes Pictures

Argentina

The Intruder

Dir. Natalia Meta

Key cast: Guillermo Arengo,...

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds” is a story about a woman trying to secure an abortion for her 15-year-old daughter in a country where terminating a pregnancy violates both national and religious laws, but — as its title suggests in two different languages — this soft hammer of a social drama is less concerned with the cruelties of Chad’s politics than it is with how people help each other to endure them together.

“Lingui” is a Chadian term that represents a tradition of altruism; a collective resilience in the face of catastrophic ordeals. When a group of young men wordlessly pull the teenage Maria (Rihane Khalil-Alio) out from a riverbed after she tries to drown herself, that is lingui. When Maria’s mother Amina (Achouackh Abakar Soulymane) agrees to aid her estranged sister at a moment of irrevocable crisis, that is lingui. When Maria’s school, afraid of how gossip might reflect on them,...

In Chad, whose two main languages are Arabic and French, “lingui” is a distinct term meaning a “bond or connection”; the film’s alternate title gives it a more pious hue—the “sacred bonds.” But what’s fascinating and most novel about African cinema great Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s new drama is the lack of an overtly religiose aura: the bonds created by its generation-spanning units of women are uplifting and resilient, while sought independently from Chad’s ruling, patriarchal class. To compare with conditions in the West, an analog would be to radical women’s networks, or even experiments in collective living and solidarity like communes.

Lingui, the Sacred Bonds is a glossier, more expensive-looking film than Haroun’s prior work; it has a slightly off-putting, color-corrected digital sheen, and less emphasis on the negative space present in the environment—all those hulking deserts and azure skies. Compared to the...

Hovering around the twenty-one to twenty-four feature film mark with at least a quarter of those films belonging to first time filmmakers, the Quinzaine des Realisateurs (a.k.a Directors’ Fortnight) has in the past couple of years, counted on a healthy supply of French, Spanish and Belgium produced film items, and has been geared towards the offbeat genre items as with last year’s edition curated by Edouard Waintrop and co. To be unveiled on the 22nd, as we attempted with our Critics’ Week predix, Blake Williams, Nicholas Bell and I (Eric Lavallee) are thinking out loud and hedging our bets on what the section might look like or what the programmers might be looking at for 2014. Here is our predictions overview:

Alleluia

Six years after presenting Vinyan at the Venice Film Festival, Fabrice Du Welz finally returns with potentially not one, but a pair of works for the ’14 campaign.

Director: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun Writer: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun Starring: Youssouf Djaoro, Diouc Koma, Emile Abossolo M’bo, Hadje Fatime N’Goua, Marius Yelolo Upon reflection, water is the most important element in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s A Screaming Man. Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), a 60-year old former swimming champion, and his son Abdel (Diouc Koma) work as pool attendants at a N’Djamena hotel. Haroun’s film [...]...

An ex-swimming star struggles to stay afloat in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's quiet, deeply humane study of family life in Chad

When the name of the landlocked African republic of Chad comes up, most cinephiles will think of the opening of Antonioni's The Passenger. In that masterly 1975 film, playing a reporter at the end of his tether while covering a hopeless civil war, Jack Nicholson swaps his identity with a dead man he finds in a remote Saharan hotel. It seems to sum up the sense of desperation and extreme experience that, rightly or wrongly, Chad incites.

However, as in other troubled, desperately poor African countries, there are a handful of gifted artists of world stature, mostly musicians but also painters and film-makers, and A Screaming Man, the fourth feature film by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Chad's only prominent film-maker, won the jury prize at last year's Cannes film festival. This year Haroun...

Attack The Block (15)

(Joe Cornish, 2011, UK) John Boyega, Nick Frost, Jodie Whittaker. 88 mins

More Critters than Cloverfield, this alien-invasion movie is modest in scale and ambition but makes up for it in local flavour. The setting is south London – Brit cinema's default "ghetto" location, bruv – where sharp-toothed ETs come to regret messing with the hoodies, who team up with their recent victim and the upstairs drug dealer to defend their manor. It's no Shaun Of The Dead, but it's up-to-date and fitfully entertaining, and there's at least some social grit beneath the down-with-the-kids comedy.

A Screaming Man (PG)

(Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, 2010, Cha/Fra/Bel) Youssouf Djaoro, Dioucounda Koma, Emile Abssolo M'Bo. 91 mins

Saying a great deal with few resources, this skillful Chadian drama finds weighty moral, global and generational concerns in the story of a swimming pool attendant and his son.

Love Like Poison (15)

(Katell Quillévéré, 2010, Fra) Clara Augarde, Lio, Stefano Cassetti.

"African cinema is generally woefully overlooked by the West, and the filmmaking being done in Republic of Chad has been particularly invisible," begins Farihah Zaman in Reverse Shot. "The oversight is not entirely unreasonable; decades of civil war have left the local film industry all but nonexistent — for thirty years there was not even a single movie theater in the entire country. That changed in 2010 when Mahamet-Saleh Haroun won the Cannes Jury Prize for A Screaming Man. His film, the first from his country to screen in competition at the prestigious French festival, now has another distinction, having convinced a government in the midst of war the importance of investing a million dollars in building a movie theater specifically so that it could be shown."

In this "ingenious and moving take on Fw Murnau's classic The Last Laugh," writes the New Yorker's Richard Brody, "Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), a former swimming...

A Screaming Man

Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

2010, Chad/Belgium/France, 103 mins.

Early on in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s powerful A Screaming Man, we see a confrontation between a father and a son. Adam, the father, is scolding his son, Abdel, because he didn’t wear white to work. They both work at the hotel pool in N’Djamena, Chad, and when we reach the end of the film, that scene suddenly takes on a new and tragic meaning. Haroun’s film works so well because, despite being a somewhat political film, it isn’t a message movie. It isn’t trying to bring attention to the ongoing conflict in Chad, it is just trying to tell a story.

The film, which won the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes, centers around Adam, an aging swimming champion who works at a western hotel in Chad. He runs the pool but times...

Reviewed by Annlee Ellingson

(from the 2010 AFI Fest)

Directed/Written by: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

Starring: Youssouf Djaoro, Diouc Koma, Emil Abossolo M’Bo, Hadjé Fatimé N’Goua, Marius Yelolo and Djénéba Koné

Writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun draws on his own survival of the perpetual civil war in his native Chad for this Cannes Jury Prize winner. In it, rebel activity flows and ebbs like the tide. Meanwhile, everyday life goes on.

For former swimming champion Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), everyday life is managing the pool at an upscale hotel with his 20-year-old son Abdel (Diouc Koma). When the resort is privatized, the new Chinese owners streamline the operation by laying off some of Adam’s closest friends and downsizing the pool staff.

Adam is reassigned to the front gate and a sweaty uniform whose sleeves and pant legs are too short for his long, once-athletic limbs. Cars honk at him incessantly to manually raise the gate arms.

Reviewed by Annlee Ellingson

(from the 2010 AFI Fest)

Directed/Written by: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

Starring: Youssouf Djaoro, Diouc Koma, Emil Abossolo M’Bo, Hadjé Fatimé N’Goua, Marius Yelolo and Djénéba Koné

Writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun draws on his own survival of the perpetual civil war in his native Chad for this Cannes Jury Prize winner. In it, rebel activity flows and ebbs like the tide. Meanwhile, everyday life goes on.

For former swimming champion Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), everyday life is managing the pool at an upscale hotel with his 20-year-old son Abdel (Diouc Koma). When the resort is privatized, the new Chinese owners streamline the operation by laying off some of Adam’s closest friends and downsizing the pool staff.

Adam is reassigned to the front gate and a sweaty uniform whose sleeves and pant legs are too short for his long, once-athletic limbs. Cars honk at him incessantly to manually raise the gate arms.

The winner of a Jury Prize at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, foreign language drama A Screaming Man will be released on DVD on Aug. 2 from independent film supplier Film Movement.

Youssouf Djaoro thinks it over in A Screaming Man.

Produced in writer/director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s native country of Chad, A Screaming Man is the first movie from sub-Saharan Africa to be chosen for the festival’s top honors in 13 years.

The film revolves around Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), a former swimming champion in his 60s who is now a pool attendant at a hotel in Chad. When the hotel is taken over by new Chinese owners, he is forced to give up his job to his son, Abdel (Dioucounda Koma), leaving Adam humiliated and resentful. Meanwhile, the country is in the throes of a civil war, with rebel forces attacking the government and the authorities demanding that the people contribute...

A Screaming Man (Un homme qui crie)

Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

Written by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

2010, France, Belgium, Chad

A certain school of cinema teaches that holding shots long enough will guarantee critical success and bountiful festival laurels for the poster campaign. Granted, the long take is one of the most electrifying techniques a filmmaker can employ, and this still-thriving stallion is being flogged by those seeking to challenge audiences. Unfortunately for them, they fail to realize that a long take worth its weight in festival gold is anything but a challenge to sit through. Apitchatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul must know this for he crafts shots of mesmerising beauty, none of which are nearly long enough for one to begin speculating on their actual purpose. Mahamat Saleh Haroun, whose A Screaming Man yielded to Joe’s Palme d’Or-winner only to clinch the Jury Prize at Cannes, is some way behind, which...

Writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun draws on his own survival of the perpetual civil war in his native Chad for this Cannes Jury Prize winner. In it, rebel activity flows and ebbs like the tide. Meanwhile, everyday life goes on.

For former swimming champion Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), everyday life is managing the pool at an upscale hotel with his 20-year-old son Abdel (Diouc Koma). When the resort is privatized, the new Chinese owners streamline the operation by laying off some of Adam's closest friends and downsizing the pool staff.

Adam is reassigned to the front gate and a sweaty uniform whose sleeves and pant legs are too short for his long, once-athletic limbs. Cars honk at him incessantly to manually raise the gate arms. He is humiliated by the demotion and resents that his son, who lacks the attention to detail Adam feels is necessary, has taken over not only his position at the pool but,...

Craig here, continuing a look at films showing at the 54th BFI London Film Festival.

I much admired Chad filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Daratt/Dry Season from 2007 (it took the #4 spot in my year-end list for that year), and he’s triumphed again with his fourth feature, A Screaming Man/Un homme qui crie. Made in the same refined and frank vein as Daratt, this new film follows Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), a pool cleaner and former swimming champion who works at an exclusive N'Djamena hotel with the assistance of his son, Abdel (Diouc Koma). After a job reshuffle Adam loses his job to Abdel; he sinks into depression fuelled by anger and humiliation, and so takes unexpected action. His situation worsens, just as civil war engulfs the country and rebel armies infiltrate the area.

Much of the film’s drama is underplayed. Haroun’s camera focuses on Adam in a curious,...

Stellan Skarsgård (second from right) in Hans Petter Moland's A Somewhat Gentle Man Chicago Film Festival 2010 Winners: How I Ended The Summer, We Are What We Are Main Competition The Gold Hugo for Best Film: How I Ended the Summer (Russia), directed by Aleksei Popogrebsky The Silver Hugo – Special Jury Award: A Somewhat Gentle Man (Norway), directed by Hans Petter Moland The Silver Hugo – Special Jury Award: We Are What We Are (Mexico), directed by Jorge Michel Grau The Silver Hugo – Best Actor: Youssouf Djaoro of A Screaming Man (France/Belgium/Chad) The Silver Hugo – Best Actress: Liana Liberato of Trust (USA) The Silver Hugo: Brother & Sister (Argentina), directed by Daniel Burman The Silver Hugo – Best Screenplay: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun of A Screaming Man (France/Belgium/Chad) Gold Plaque: Márta Mészáros in recognition of her career in international cinema, on the occasion of Last Report on Anna (Hungary) Silver Plaque:...

Chicago – The 2010 46th Annual Chicago International Film Festival and Michael Kutza, Founder and Artistic Director, announced the competition award winners at a ceremony at the Pump Room in Chicago on October 16th. The Gold Hugo for Best Film went to “How I Ended the Summer,” from Russia.

Kutza made the announcements, along with Mimi Plauché, Head of Programming, and Associate Programmers Joel Hoglund and Penny Bartlett. The Pump Room is the legendary restaurant inside the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago. The Festival’s highest honor is the Gold Hugo, named for the mythical God of Discovery.

International Feature Film Competition

’How I Ended The Summer’

Photo Credit: Chicago International Film Festival

The Gold Hugo for Best Film: “How I Ended the Summer” (Russia), directed by Aleksei Popogrebsky

The Silver Hugo – Special Jury Award: “A Somewhat Gentle Man” (Norway), directed by Hans Petter Moland

The Silver Hugo – Special Jury Award: “We...

The awards for the Chicago International Film festival were handed out last night and actor Youssouf Djaoro won the Silver Hugo Grand Prize for best actor for his lead performance in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s superb film Un Homme Qui Crie (A Screaming Man) Haroun also was awarded last night the Silver Hugo award for Best Screenplay as well for his film.

Best Actress award winner Liana Liberato

The 46th Chicago International Film Festival (Ciff 2010) Award Winners Announced

Click Here for complete coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival (Ciff 2010)

Russia, Mexico, Norway, Germany and USA win top awards in Chicago …

Chicago, October 16, 2010 – Michael Kutza, Founder and Artistic Director of the

Chicago International Film Festival, Mimi Plauché, Head of Programming, and Associate

Programmers Joel Hoglund and Penny Bartlett proudly announce the winners of the 46th

Chicago International Film Festival competitions. The Festival’s highest honor is the

Gold Hugo, named after the mythological God of Discovery.

International Feature Film Competition

Gold Hugo for Best Film to How I Ended The Summer (Russia) for the brilliantly

acted and dynamically staged exploration of human nature under pressure. Director:

Aleksei Popogrebsky

Special Jury Prize shared by:

Silver Hugo Special Jury Prize to A Somewhat Gentle Man (Norway) for a

hilarious and deeply serious adventure into crime and,...

Ok, so Sergio already wrote a reveiw of this film last week but, given that I saw it a few days later and that it screens at this year’s London Film Festival, which starts next week… and that I loved it… Well, I figured it was worth mentioning again this week.

As you’re probably aware if you were anywhere near this site earlier in the year, Mahamet Saleh Haroun’s Un Homme Qui Crie (A Screaming Man) won the Jury Prize at Cannes Film Festival in May. The third in what could be said to be a trilogy of father-son themed films following Abouna (2002) and Daratt (2006), A Screaming Man is once again set in modern day Chad and, like Daratt, is set against the backdrop of war.

However, as is usual with Haroun’s films, loud, physical and external conflict is absent from the screen and attention placed,...

The consensus seems to be that Cannes 2010 was far from a stellar year. But the competition produced a bewitching Palme d'Or winner, there were frequent gems elsewhere, and flashes of real social engagement from the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Lucy Walker

• Peter Bradshaw's full review of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Cannes 2010 may have been a non-vintage year in many ways, but it yielded a glorious Palme d'Or winner in the form of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, an utterly beguiling film, bewitchingly mysterious and strange in his distinctive manner, and unselfconsciously yet unapologetically spiritual – a spirituality that the director quietly offers as an alternative to the belligerent nationalism and factious politics for which Thailand is now in the news.

It is a compassionate film that combines gentle comedy with fantasy and offers a transcendental vision of love,...

A Screaming Man is a quote from the poetry collection Return to My Native Land by Aime Cesaire, but it’s also a title of an upcoming French war drama film directed by Mahamat Saleh Haroun, and movie scheduled to compete for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival 2010.

The whole story is set during turbulent times in Chad, so no wonder they already describe it as “a kind of history handed down from father to son… and from generation to generation”…

Here’s A Screaming Man synopsis: “Present-day Chad. Adam, 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. Terribly resentful, he feels socially humiliated.

The country is in the throes of a civil war. Rebel forces are attacking the government.

Updated through 5/18.

"By Sunday evening the strongest competition film, at least for me, was the deceptively straightforward A Screaming Man, from the Chadian-born director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, a self-designated exile living in France." Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "The story turns on a former swimming champion turned hotel pool man, Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), whose world collapses when he loses his job to his only son. With its initial unhurried rhythms and emphasis on quotidian details — one gently sexy early scene shows Adam and his wife feeding each other watermelon — the film creates a misleading sense of calm, which makes the coming tragedy all the more devastating. What begins as modest portrait of a happy family gives way to a story in which the encroaching civil war decimates not only the country, but also the soul of a man who believes the pool is his entire life."...

Lucy Walker made nukes terrifying again, while Takeshi Kitano turned in a bloodbath. Peter Bradshaw reviews the latest festival screenings

The most traumatic experience at Cannes so far was the horror film to end all horror films, during which I experienced a 90-minute anxiety attack. British documentary-maker Lucy Walker presented us with her Countdown to Zero, for which the tagline should be: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Fear the Bomb. Her film is about the ubiquity of nuclear weapons and the simply terrifying amount of weapons-grade material that is sloshing about, unaccounted for, after the breakup of the Soviet Union – material that terrorists would love to get their hands on.

Nukes are a subject that we have long made a semi-conscious decision to ignore. Walker powerfully revives the subject, touching on how we could have a nuclear detonation from terrorists or the Dr Strangelove scenario – a "legitimate" attack by accident.