Abouna
Programme Notes
Director: Mahamat Saleh Haroun
Writer: Mahamat Saleh Haroun
Actors: Ahidjo Mahamat Moussa, Hamza Moctar Aguid, Zara Haroun, Mounira Khalil,
Koulsy Lamko, Garba Issa
Running time 84 minutes
Country Chad/France
Year 2002
(A little, and only a little, of the film's content is revealed in these notes.)
Neil Young, Jigsaw Lounge: [Read the full review here]
One day Tahir and Amine wake up to discover their father has disappeared. The kids only realise something is badly amiss when Dad doesn’t turn up to referee their football match. Their investigations reveal he’s been leading some kind of double life (a la the recent French movies Time Out and The Adversary). Through the accumulation of small detail, Haroun builds a believable, textured vision of the brothers’ lives, and the environments in which they move, from their original, chaotic home near the Cameroun border ("When you’re there, you’re already elsewhere") to the stifling confines of the Koranic school.
Though events take a darker turn in the second half, there’s much quirky humour along the way.
But the intent is clearly very serious: Chad has been through all sorts of hardship, and Haroun is careful over specific points about the various factors shaping the boys’ development (football, government, economics, the church, parents), and to do so with the minimum of fuss. There’s clearly an allegorical level to his tale, the Arabic word ‘abouna’ meaning ‘our father’ in both the physical and spiritual sense, as in English – Chad, like the brothers, feeling abandoned, cut off from a previously all-controlling authority (perhaps God, perhaps the stifling but stabilising hand of France, the colonial power – the characters switch easily and frequently into French.)
There’s plenty of food for thought – and the film does linger and grow in the mind after it’s over... Haroun gets fine performances out of Aguid and Moussa as the boys, and Zara Haroun (no relation) arguably makes the biggest impact in her brief appearances as the harassed mother. At first implacable and stately as she chugs around town on her motor-scooter, she declines suddenly and harrowingly into silence as events take their toll. Abouna ends on a cautious note of welcome optimism – but it’s a daringly quiet, even up-in-the-air finale, like one of those ‘true tales’ left hanging for another bedtime.
Philip French, The Observer: [Read The Full Review Here]
Abouna is a simple, beautifully told tale with affecting music by the Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure. It's also a most sophisticated piece of filmmaking. The director's awareness of the tradition he's working in is expressed through the three posters outside the cinema Tahir and Amine visit - Chaplin's The Kid , Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise and Idrissa Ouedraogo's Yaaba from Burkina Faso.
Rich Cline, Shadows on the Wall: [Read The Full Review Here]
In addition to excellent performances from the two young lead actors, the film has am accomplished visual style. It's beautifully shot with a superior sense of style and colour, catching the feel of the settings nicely without either falling into cliche or locking the action too specifically in a time or place... In this sense, the film feels like a classic film (Bicycle Thieves comes to mind). But it's also very specifically African; the plot can be read allegorically as the story of Chad itself, a people adrift and badly in need of returning to their true roots (which predate both colonial rule and Islam).
From the iofilm review: [Read The Full Review Here]
To oversimplify somewhat, it didn't come across as an African film made by and for Africans. Instead it felt like a world cinema piece, aimed squarely at European and North American audiences, looking for something mildly exotic, yet still within their comfort zone. Perhaps it's the fact that writer/director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun is French educated and worked in the French media, prior to turning to filmmaking. Whatever the case, watching Abouna, I didn't learn anything about life in Chad, or what is particular about its cinema. Instead, I saw an opening that plays like De Sica's neo-realist classic, Bicycle Thieves, with the boys' father substituting for the bicycle.
Then, after a self-referential sequence, where Amine and Tahir see their father on the cinema screen, I saw a take-off of Truffaut's Nouvelle Vague masterpiece, The 400 Blows, as the pair are sent to a disciplinarian Islamic school, after being caught stealing.
It might well be argued that these are canonical films and movements, touchstones that every filmmaker should have an awareness of, regardless of cultural background. But it's also sad if a perceived need to reference them and work within their long-established frameworks, to get a wider audience, prevents new, native styles from developing. That's not so much respect for one's influences as cultural imperialism.
Jamie Russell, for BBCi: [Read The Full Review Here]
The film's story unfolds at a lyrical pace, often paying more attention to the beauty of Abraham Haile Biru's understated cinematography than its characters. Playing in the shadows of the sun-drenched desert locations, Biru creates a series of gorgeous compositions that capture the dark underside to this coming-of-age tale.
Guiding the story with a gentle - but hesitant - hand, director Haroun's debut feature desperately cries out for a firmer touch. With a stronger sense of purpose behind the camera, the potential symbolism of the boys' plight (a mirror-image of war-torn Chad's sense of abandonment?) might have seemed less accidental.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: [Read The Full Review Here]
Rich in understated humanity, Abouna is a film about love and loss, imbued with the most profound tenderness towards children and childhood. It manages, in the most remarkable way, to get extraordinarily dramatic life events in the lives of two young boys into just 81 minutes of screen time, while always maintaining its unhurried walking-pace narrative. It never harasses or hectors its audience; the performances are calm and deeply felt, and so is the way they are shaped and photographed...
Haroun demonstrates a gloriously quietist art in his direction, and Abouna thoroughly deserves to enjoy the kind of acclaim recently lavished on Iranian cinema's images of children. This movie has moments that linger in the mind: the boys running back from the cinema, the boys playing keepie-uppie in the street, the boys walking on their hands after looking for their father at the Chad-Cameroon border crossing, with all the insouciance of childhood, unable yet to comprehend the seriousness of what has happened to them. It's the serendipitous skill in capturing images that shows the highest possible refinement of talent.
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Keswick Film Club 2003
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