I just want to tell about my people – they have problems but they are still alive, and I want to tell stories about them. –Mahamet Saleh Haroun

Two brothers—15-year-old Tahir and 8-year-old Amine are united in their profound love for their father. They live what appears to be a middle-class existence in the Chadian capital of N’Djaména. They have a nice, neat house with a courtyard, and they have obviously been well brought up. They go to school. They get along with each other. Even though bright-eyed Amine is a bit of a pest, his doe-eyed elder brother is laid-back and obviously feels great affection for the boy. Their mother cares about them and stays up late sewing. Their father has a good job in a factory, and he referees their weekly soccer games. He reads Amine to sleep every night with passages from The Little Prince. They have a good life.

But much of it is built on illusion.

The father, we will learn, has not worked in 2 _ years. (Reminiscent of the French film Time Out, he has neglected to share that fact with his family; instead, he has gone off to "work" every day, maintaining the pretense of normalcy.) As the film opens, we see him taking off for good, turning slowly around to stare us in the eyes. (What exactly is he feeling? Guilt? Remorse? Regret? He is inscrutable.) He leaves his family in shock—anger on the part of the mother; confusion, embarrassment, and denial on the part of the boys.

We start to see the holes in the fabric of their happy lives. Young Amine is severely asthmatic (it’s not clear if this is a new condition, or something that was exacerbated by the father’s departure). The mother works hard at some outside job—riding home tired on her motorbike, quick to lose patience with her sons. Their beloved Uncle Adoum is scorned by the neighbors as a lazy good-for-nothing, despite his musical talent (presumably, he and his brother have a lot in common.). Although they appear neat and clean, the boys, we realize, are always wearing the same clothes.

Why has this happened to them? Or, as Amine poses the question towards the end of the film, "Why are we suffering like this?" The boys struggle to understand. They look for their father, both literally and metaphorically. They hang around the bridge that links Chad and Cameroon, where he has presumably gone. Amine looks in the dictionary for the word "irresponsible" (the epithet their mother has given their father), and he finds it defined as "someone who is not responsible." Seizing upon the better half of this double-meaning, Amine declares that this means their dad was not responsible for leaving them. For a time, this seems to console him. But he keeps dreaming of his father, seeing him everywhere, his confusion reaching its peak when he is convinced that his father is an actor in a film that he and Tahir are watching. They sneak into the cinema to steal the film to see if it is indeed he, which sets off a chain-reaction of unfortunate—and ultimately tragic—consequences. Yet at the end of that chain will be a different kind of love, and in the end the possibility of renewal.

* * *

Born in 1961, director Mahamet Saleh Haroun left Chad during the civil war of the 1980s and made his way to Paris, by way of Cameroon. He worked as a journalist for several years, studied film at the Conservatoire Libre du Cinema in Paris, and began making films set in Africa. He made a number of short films, including the thriller Goi Goi (The Dwarf). His first feature film was Bye Bye Africa (1998), which chronicles his return to Chad and his travels around N’Djaména with his old friend, a former projectionist. The film brought him global attention and acclaim. (We featured Bye Bye Africa at the 11^th Cascade Festival of African Films).

He soon began work on his next film, which would become Abouna. He wanted to explore an all-too-common phenomenon—fathers leaving their families, presumably to find work but also for other reasons, and never returning. He has said that it is common for Chadian men to go to Cameroon (as the father does in the film) and then onwards to other countries, leaving their families in a state of limbo. Himself a father of two, Haroun tried to imagine what that would be like from the point of view of the children left behind. So the film was born.

Haroun spent several years trying to pull together the financing for Abouna. He was aided by two other filmmakers who served as Executive Producers—Abderrahmane Sissako (Life on Earth, Waiting for Happiness) and Bassek ba Kobhio (Sango Malo, Le Grand Blanc de Lamberéné, The Forest). He eventually received support from various European grant agencies.

He was able to bring the talented cinematographer Abraham Haile Biru (who has done most of his work in the Netherlands) to the project, along with the talented young actor Ahidjo Mahamat Moussa, who had been working in the theater since the age of 9, to play Tahir. Young Moussa was able to take the director’s suggestions and improvise freely from them. Haroun would request a particular emotional response for the character, and the young man would consistently find a way to convey that emotion for the camera. With Biru leading the camera crew, Haroun was able to develop a style for the film that is deceptively simple, but in fact is both expressive and elegant.

In preparing the film, Haroun had the two boys live together for two weeks, which served two purposes: it allowed the boys to become close and very natural with one another; it also allowed him to observe them and incorporate aspects of their relationship into the script. Most of the actors were non-professionals, which in part led the director to be frugal in the amount of film he shot (expense was of course another factor). In an interview, he explains his rationale: "The problem is when actors are non-professional – if you repeat and rehearse a lot, and they are kids, they are maybe too much concentrating. So I have to [prepare to] shoot [so that] the first one will be the best, because if not they are like tired or something like that and you don’t have the same dialogue as before, because we are improvising. So we tried to just concentrate them and then shoot in one shot or two shots. If you have more than three shots it’s not good."

The boys’ hatred of the Koranic school experience reflected the director’s own experience as a young man. In fact, in its original conception the film was much harsher in its depiction of that experience. However, after September 11^th, he decided to tone it down to keep the film from being caught up in the wave of anti-Muslim prejudice that swept the West ("We speak a lot about Islamic danger," says Haroun, "but there is a large majority who are just living with God. They love, they get married, they die. That is not what we see on TV."). In its final form the boys’ unhappiness with the school has more to do with their longing to find their father and their desire to return home.

Abouna was featured at the 2002 Cannes Festival Director’s Fortnight, and won the award for Best Cinematography at FESPACO 2003. Playing to positive reviews at festivals around the world, it has unfortunately received little play in Chad itself (which still possesses only one movie theater), but will presumably soon receive wider exposure now that it is available on videotape.

When he is not showing his earlier films or in Africa working on a new one, Haroun lives and works in Bordeaux.

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