Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
Born
in Chad in 1961, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun left the country during the civil
war of the 1980s and relocated to France, by way of Cameroon. There he
worked as a journalist before studying at the Conservatoire Libre du
Cinéma in Paris. He is now more than a dozen years into his career as a
filmmaker, shooting primarily in Chad. This career has so far produced
three feature films and a number of shorts that have made Haroun one of
the leading lights in African cinema. He excels at spinning narratives
that begin with easily recognizable situations – usually the loss of a
parent – and expand to encompass allegorical and political reflection on
the state of Chadian society. Often calm on the surface, Haroun’s
filmmaking belies this calm with simmering strains of anger and
melancholy. While occasionally compared to the work of Iranian directors
Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, perhaps because of their
deceptively quiet surfaces, Haroun’s films recognizably belong to an
African tradition of filmmaking stretching from Ousmane Sembene to
Abderrahmane Sissako that considers the place of cinema in a
postcolonial Africa and, by extension, in a postcolonial world.
—filmstudycenter.org
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