Freedom

Leaning back on a simple chair, in a simple white room, 40-something director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun recalls an early film-going experience. “It was an Indian film,” she says, “There was a close-up of a very beautiful woman looking directly at the camera, or as it seemed to me, at the audience. And for a few seconds, I believed her smile. She was smiling with an unforgettable smile. For a few seconds, I believed she was smiling at me.” While Haroun uses this story to describe his initiation into film—into his desire to make movies—it also sets up the situation for the boy protagonists of Abouna (Our Father).

The movie begins with a gorgeous, haunting image, a man walking across desert sands, handsome, silent, intriguing. He walks into frame, looks directly at the camera, or, as it seems to you, at the audience. And then he turns and walks away. For that moment of a look, however, he is enthralling. And you might imagine he’s gazing at you.

Following a brief break for titles, the film resumes with eight-year-old Amine (Hamza Moctar Aguid) and his 15-year-old brother Tahir (Ahidjo Mahamat Moussa) (both completely touching and convincing, though, as Haroun notes in his interview, he uses no professional actors, only his “own network of actors… they’re mostly from my neighborhood”). The boys wake to a new morning, their horsing around framed by their home’s narrow doorway. Their routine seems uncomplicated, except that Amine’s shower is cut short when the water gives out, and their father appears to be missing. They try not to worry, but when their friends head off to play soccer—without their father, who was supposed to referee—they remain huddled on the street corner where they’ve all gathered, looking off screen, fretful.

Their mother (Zara Haroun) doesn’t want to discuss the disappearance, taking the water problem as a welcome distraction, disappearing into the house. When Amine presses her, she reveals that he’s left them, that he’s “irresponsible” (which the boys take to mean he’s not “responsible”). As she speaks, Tahir paces outside the blue door, the accusations made off screen, his wounded face and bowed head all too visible. Repeatedly, the boys’ environment reflects the depth of their simultaneous confusion and hopefulness. Set in a small city in Chad near the Cameroon border, Abouna shows vast stretches of sand, filthy streets, and huddled houses, superbly med—in tracking and still shots—by Abraham Haile Biru. Caught within these seemingly open spaces, the boys also appear repeatedly in doorways, narrow internal frames, shot from low angles that emphasize simultaneously their limited mobility and their transitional positions. They’re kids too quickly entering adulthood, they’re afraid and curious.

Seeking their father, they walk through the city, landing at the border to Cameroon. Tahir stands with his arm over Amine’s thin shoulder, as they watch over the milling pedestrians amid dust, motorbikes, and trucks. Their eyes pan the faces before them as Tahir’s voiceover explains, “Cross this bridge”—which you see is patrolled by military guards—“and you’re in another country. Everyone who doesn’t fly passes through here. Perhaps our father is among them.”

Though they don’t see him here, Amine spots him later, when the boys go to a movie: a character on screen stands in a doorway, his back to the camera, angled low on his thin frame. When he turns to face the audience, Amine recognizes him, calls out to him and identifies himself: “Dad, it’s me, Amine. Look at me. Please dad.” Miraculously, it seems, he greets them, “Hello kids,” and the camera (your camera), cuts back to the brothers, looking up at the screen, rapt. Cut back to the movie within the movie, and the father on screen is greeting two movie kids, who walk past him through his doorway, transitioning into their own domestic safety. Amine and Tahir are stunned.

But this surprising, maybe magical moment is nothing compared to the news that their mother, overcome by her new situation, feels unable to care for them: she sends Amine and Tahir to and Islamic boarding school, where they are surrounded by other kids looking lost. “I’ll consider them my own kids,” the director tells their mother, as the boys stand against a pale, tall wall, pushed to the right of the frame. “I’ll make them into good people.” But the problem, illustrated by Amine’s brief effort to cling to his mother, is that no one considers them his or her own. The brothers are left with one another—her car disappears through a gate, trailing clouds of dust.

The dust is at once material and metaphorical, as Amine develops a cough, increasingly unable even to breathe, as he and Tahir keep their focus on escaping the school in order to find their father, who now becomes a mythic emblem, of injury but also of independence. The school’s director regularly beats his charges, including Tahir, who tells Amine afterwards, “It hurts everywhere. As soon as teacher lets me go, we’re going to look for dad.”

The camera closes on them as they look back, not at you, though they smile, but at a passing girl in yellow (Mounira Khalil), beautiful, serene, and deaf-mute. Eventually, this wondrously unbound girl—always appearing just when she’s needed, ever traversing boundaries of time and place—comes to embody a kind of magical solace for Tahir, who observes, “Nothing’s more important than freedom.” That freedom so typically remains a word, an idea beyond experience, only makes it seem more crucial.

Haroun’s second film (his first was 1999’s Bye Bye Africa) is lilting and profound at once, precise and sinuous, pulsing with brilliant, sometimes breathtaking color and dense emotional detail, even as it tells a tale of loss and longing. As you look at Amine and Tahir, and they look back at you, Abouna insists that you pay attention.