“I lost my country so I try to rebuild it with my movies.”

Mahamat Saleh Haroun, born in Chad in 1961, has fast established himself as one of Africa’s top film directors. His second feature film Abouna won an award for Best Cinematography at FESPACO, and his third film, Daratt (premiering on The Africa Channel this Saturday at 9pm) won the Grand Jury Prize at the 63rd Venice Film Festival.  Haroun’s 2010 film A Screaming Man went on to win the Jury Prize at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, making him the first Chadian director to enter and win a Cannes award.

Daratt, Haroun’s third feature film, focuses on 16 year old Atim – an orphan given a revolver by his grandfather so that he may kill the man who killed his father.  Atim leaves his village for N’djamena, seeking a man he does not know. He quickly locates him: former war criminal Nassara is now married and settled down as the owner of a small bakery. With the firm intention of killing him, Atim gets closer to Nassara under the guise of looking for work, and is hired as an apprentice baker. Intrigued by Atim’s attitude toward him, Nassara takes him under his wing and teaches him the secrets of making bread. Over the weeks, a strange relationship evolves between the two. Despite his disgust, Atim seems to recognise in Nassara the father figure he has always needed, while Nassara sees the teenager as a potential son.

Whilst attending the London screening of Daratt, Mahamat Saleh Haroun answered some of the audience’s questions about the film and his reasons behind why it was made:

Q: How did you come up with your ideas before you made Daratt – what was going on at that particular time in Chad?

A: I lost my Chad; I lost my country so I try to rebuild it with my movies. If we didn’t have this civil war, I would have been in danger, so I had to leave my country.  I think no one could just leave their country and their family and move to another place if not in some sort of danger, so that’s why I left my country, and that’s how I became what I am now.  So I’m just trying to maybe find with my cinema the right place where I can give to people the happiness I felt when I saw my first movie.

Q: Daratt is perhaps a response to the civil war, and the absent father – is it part of a connection between absent parent and waiting for happiness?

A: Daratt is the difficulty in building something – let’s call it a Generation of the Desert, where you’re just in a desert and you try to build your own life or your own future and it’s very difficult to do it because you don’t have any past.  In Daratt, it’s a father who has been killed, so you are orphaned and you have someone who is your present, who is the grandfather, telling you to kill a man, which is not your present and it’s not your future, so you have to try and create your own way and build something.  What I don’t like about the movie is it seems like my own story; I left Chad and I had to try and find my own way, so in a way it’s my own story.

Q: You mentioned that there aren’t any cinemas in Chad – is this still the case? How easy is it for you to make a film there without being able to show it?

A: We don’t have any cinemas where you can screen a movie on 35mm film, and we have only one cinema in French where you can screen the movie in 33mm.  Its places like video clubs where they screen films on VHS, as not a lot of places can screen DVD.  So you screen your features on VHS, but I don’t think it conveys that passion of cinema that I want to transmit, so I think we need more cinemas to inspire people to become film makers.  Also, the video clubs are just done on a TV screen, so you can’t share with people your passion for cinema if it’s only viewed on a small screen.

Q: Can you tell us about your journey from script to making the film?

A: When I have an idea of a film I don’t start writing; I think about it more so I can build my story before I start writing. I structure the whole story in my head, but for Daratt, I had 12 or 13 versions because I could not find the end, and once in the middle of the night I was sleeping, I had a dream and I saw a hand giving me the paper saying ‘this is your end’, so I woke up and wrote the end.  It was difficult to find the right end but I found it after 13 versions.

Q: Who are your favourite film makers?

A: Influences changes as you grow older.  Right now I’m closer to directors from Asia, but my first director was Charlie Chaplin – he was the best one.  But it is difficult for a filmmaker to say he has influences from just one place – they range from France and everywhere else.  As an African kid, I use to try and see movies from everywhere, and there was no school so was no way to analyse things. You would go to see Hollywood and Western movies and you find your own way because in Chad, the problem is there were no filmmakers – I’m the first one, and like in my movies, my characters try to find their own way, so that what I was trying to do.  But I love Charlie Chaplin.

Full interview can be found on the Daratt DVD, on sale now.