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Reviewed by:
  • Dry Season directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
  • Dayna Oscherwitz
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, director. Dry Season. Original title: Daratt. 2006. 96 minutes. French and Chadian Arabic, with English subtitles. Chad and France. ArtMattan Production. $26.95. DVD. $9.95. DSR.

Daratt (2006), is the third feature-length film by the Chadian filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. A hybrid revenge/quest/coming-of-age narrative that takes place in the aftermath of Chad’s long civil conflict, the film follows sixteen-year-old Atim (Ali Barkai), whose name means “orphan,” as he fulfills the demand of his blind grandfather, Guma Abatcha (Khayar Oumar Defallah) that he avenge the killing of his father, Guma’s son. Atim journeys from his home in Abéché in the Ouaddaï region of northeastern Chad to Moussoro, a market town north of the capital, Ndjamena, where he meets Nassara (Youssouf Djaoro), his father’s killer. Nassara, who during the war had the reputation of being a brutal killer, has returned to his former life as a baker and is newly married and expecting a child. Unaware of Atim’s identity, Nassara takes him on as an apprentice. He teaches Atim a trade and provides him with the paternal authority and identity Atim seems to lack. Ultimately, Atim, who is deeply conflicted about his position in Nassara’s life, his loyalties to his grandfather, and his own identity, lures Nassara into the desert between Moussoro and Abéché and reveals his identity. He points his father’s gun at him but shoots into the air, perhaps convincing his grandfather he has achieved revenge, although this is never clear. Nassara is left on the ground, prostrate but alive.

Daratt is the second film in a trilogy that also contains Our Father (Abouna, 2002) and A Screaming Man (L’Homme qui crie, 2010) all of which focus on crises of paternity, masculinity, and identity in conflict and postcon-flict settings. Like all of Haroun’s films, Daratt is visually stunning, haunt-ingly silent, and inevitably contemplative. It is also a quintessentially urban film that both records and interrogates urban spaces and their relationship [End Page 237] to their inhabitants in ways that are evocative of the films of Raj Kapoor, François Truffaut, and Spike Lee.

The history of conflict in Chad and the amnesty figure prominently in the opening sequence. Here a blend of genres foregrounds the burdens inherited by the postconflict generation in war-torn societies and interrogates the ways in which they come to terms with the national and personal scars inflicted by war. Atim, for example, enacts the revenge narrative, but it is not his own narrative, but rather a narrative imposed upon him by a vengeful patriarch. Like most soldiers in war zones, he is sent as a sacrifice to a conflict he neither embraces nor understands. The coming-of-age narrative is his own, and he follows it nearly to the letter—the move to the city, the apprenticeship, and even the internal transformation. However, this narrative, too, is incomplete. In the end, both of these genres are truncated, amputated—like the grandfather, who is blind, and Nassara, who needs a medical device in order to speak—by the war story that preceded them. Seeing either of them to completion is to validate one side or the other in the conflict, to legitimize the brutality and injustice of the war, and probably to guarantee its continuation.

Thus Daratt suggests that no single genre is capable of capturing the reality of a postconflict society or the generation borne of it. It is on this generation, the film suggests, and its ability to navigate the impossible and conflicting duties, demands, emotions, and narratives of war and reconciliation, that permanent peace depends. Atim seems, through great personal turmoil, to come to terms with reconciliation by symbolically imposing upon Nassara a loss equivalent to that of his grandfather. However, in the process he sacrifices himself, becoming doubly an orphan, losing both his real father and the symbolic father who is the only father figure he has known. Atim, then, also experiences an amputation, creating an equivalency among all parties in the civil war’s economy of loss...

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