Film Screening:

Daratt / Dry Season

(Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, 2006, 96 min, Chad, in Arabic and French w/ English subtitles, Color, DVD)

-- Discussion to follow

Chad, 2006. After a forty-year civil war, the radio announces the government has just amnestied the war criminals. Outraged by the news, Gumar Abatcha orders his grandson Atim, a sixteen-year-old youth, to trace the man who killed his father and to execute him. Atim obeys him and, armed with his father's own gun, he goes in search of Nassara, the man who made him an orphan. He is bent on revenge. But instead of a cold-hearted killer, Atim finds a quiet, regal man. Nassara (Youssouf Djaoro) has left killing behind and now is married, goes to the mosque and owns a small bakery. Nassara takes on the young man as an apprentice baker and now Atim just waits for the right moment to strike.

With characteristic precision, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun sets his characters at a moral standoff. In scenes that shift between hushed tension and stark absurdity, Atim learns how to work dough and fire the oven, yet still practices wielding his weapon. Nassara, whose war wounds have left him speaking through a device he holds to his throat, observes the boy's progress but gives nothing away. 

Haroun's aesthetic is uniquely suited to the parched, war-ravaged landscape of Chad. This is a cinema of subsistence, from a place where life is lived marginally and characters are stripped of all but the most essential.

-- Winner for Best Cinematography in Ouagadougou Panafrican Film and Television Festival (2007) and 5 awards in Venice Film Festival (2006)!

"Using a simple storytelling style that grows stronger with each passing scene, Dry Season draws the viewer into its small two-character drama set in post-war Chad, while it offers a deep reflection on injustice and frustrated revenge."-- Variety

Cost: Free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

Sponsors: The Africa Initiative, the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI), the Center for French and Francophone Studies, the Department of Cultural Anthropology, and the Department of African and African American Studies.