The most feminist film to date in competition at the Cannes Film Festival has been directed by an African man. In Lingui, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun questions the links and values that are considered sacred in a patriarchal society like Chad: the absolute ban on abortion, the excision of girls and the submission of women. The Chadian filmmaker manages to turn a tragic story into an optimistic utopia thanks to the power of the images with astonishing beauty.
If we could just pick one scene from this wonderful movie, it would be the one from the beginning. Where Amina struggles to get out of an old truck tire steel wire to then weave beautiful baskets. Once she has revived the matter in another form, the mother leaves her modest home to seek a future for her 15-year-old daughter and herself. Dressed in an orange-ocher dress that marries the sun and the sand and with three baskets on her head and two in her hands, she walks and radiates a divine grace. However, we must remember: she only goes to town to sell her baskets on the street or in the market.
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, a cinema of the essentials
As a painter, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun frees all superfluous or superficial things from his compositions to get to the point. Projected on the big screen, it allows us to live and travel with his characters, to move like them in this natural and human landscape where he entered us like a captain in his canoe.
The Chadian director loves to give time after time. His film draws its energy from the beauty of gestures and colors, the degree of silhouettes and landscapes, the depth of humanity expressed through the voices of men and women.
He has always refused to hand over his pictures to an obligation to do something. A screaming man, Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival 2010, tells a father-son story against the background of the civil war in Chad, where Haroun himself was wounded before going into exile for a long time in France. In 2013, he presented at Cannes Grigri, a love story between a young disabled dancer and a young prostitute. And four years later, he was again on the hunt for the Palme d’Or with his documentary about the former Chadian president and dictator Hissène Habré, without which he “will never have left Chad“.
Abortion taboos linked to sexual violence
In Lingui, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun is once again slowing down the pace of the images. This one stays slow until the end. On the other hand, the story accelerates in our heads and leads us to other horizons. Lingui’s story – the sacred bonds – seems simple. A 15-year-old girl becomes pregnant and risks repeating her mother’s tragic fate. Like her daughter today, Amina was abandoned by the child’s father and expelled from school. To this day, she has to work hard to survive, her family has cut off all contact with her. And since she became a grandmother, no one respects her in this society, which is dominated by the Muslim religion.
So how do you get out of this dead end? Maria wants an abortion at all costs so as not to suffer the same fate as her mother. But this act, which has become commonplace in many Western societies, is doubly banned in Chad, by the Muslim religion and by the law that provides for five years in prison.
Hypocrisy in Chadian society
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun – short-lived Minister of Culture in Chad from 2017 to 2018, a position he officially left for “personal reasons” – brings to light in a thousand ways the hypocrisy that reigns throughout Chadian society. The religion (“we are all brothers”) which, above all, ensures that women remain in the place determined by the patriarchy. There is also hypocrisy in men whose actions often contradict their words. Without forgetting the school that sets the chimera for the company’s reputation over its educational mission. Then, the detail that kills: in the film, the good of the only human fails.
The solidarity between women who are abused by society then remains. They never stop looking for solutions to problems that are considered insoluble. They alone carry the change, often introduced by detours, actions in the shadows, while pretending to respect the tradition and rules of this society that surrounds them. Women realize that the time has not yet come to openly demand respect and change.
The horizon for a possible change
With its happy ending, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s saga is probably far from the reality of Chad. And it is a pity that some scenes give the impression of an educational note that is aimed more at a Western audience than African or universal. Nevertheless, the film’s greatest merit remains intact: to outline the horizon for a possible change and to nominate the actors for this upheaval. Above all, feed our imagination with breathtakingly beautiful images. It was always the struggle for dreams and commitment to utopias that made societies move forward.
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