A Screaming Man (2010)

Chad is not usually thought of as a country with a rich cinematic tradition, and indeed, it was not until about a decade or so ago with the advent of some form of political stability that a Chadian cinema even emerged, but Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's A Screaming Man is proof that this country is worth watching. Set in the mid-2000s, the film centers on Adam, the country's first pool attendant and swimming champion who knows nothing else in life aside from his beloved pool. But times have changed, the hotel he works at has been privatized and taken over by a Chinese firm, and his old friends are being laid off. To top it off, he is replaced by his son Abdel, and made the new hotel gatekeeper. Adam's life is thrown into chaos, and he finds himself resentful of his son. In the background, a civil war has broken out, and when Abdel is drafted, Adam does nothing to intervene, knowing he will get his beloved job back. But things never quite work out as we expect them to, and in Adam's case, the guilt of having betrayed his one and only son is too much to bear. Haroun's direction is quiet, and his method of storytelling very much rooted in patient realism, but he is able to evoke a great deal of emotion in his observations of the quiet spaces that exist in between our lives, and eschews the melodramatic. I will fully admit that this movie is a tearjerker. There are political elements throughout (the civil war is never shown, only pictures of dead soldiers on television, and the sounds of helicopters in the air suggesting more of a political show as opposed to an actual war), but in the end, the focus is on the human element. Not a perfect film, but definitely a great one.