“When everything’s standardised, what matters are voices, music that’s different and dissonant”
– BERLINALE 2026: The French-Chadian director discusses the genesis of his new film which interweaves legends and realism in the syncretic spirit typical of everyday life in that region
Unveiled in competition in the 76th Berlinale, Soumsoum, the Night of the Stars [+see also:
film review
interview: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
film profile] is the 9th feature film by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun.
Cineuropa: Where did the idea for this story flirting with timelessness come from? Were you inspired by the extraordinary backdrop of the Ennedi plateau?
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun: I experienced something similar with someone who’d been turned away because he wasn’t a practicing believer, but in the end we managed to find a grave for him. But I didn’t know how to approach the subject. The Ennedi plateau gave me a way in. Over there, there’s a huge number of legends which reminded me of fairy tales from my childhood. They’re practically origin stories, and I decided we had to talk about them by way of a really legendary story. Ennedi is the cradle of humanity: it’s where they found the skull of Toumaï, the first hominid on Earth. So I wanted to convey that timelessness to symbolise the universality of our shared origin and shared destiny.
Why did you choose a teenage girl as your protagonist?
Because she’s an adult in the making, in construction, in rebellion, but also because she’s a woman because, generally speaking, at least in Chad, women are assigned a very specific place. I wanted there to be a shift, for Kellou’s character to shake up the patriarchy’s established order a little bit. But I also wanted there to be a bond of friendship between these two women, Kellou and Aya; something invisible. Aya is there to make Kellou aware that it’s possible to see, to reconcile with her origins.
How did you achieve the balance between legend and realism?
It’s all related to current, everyday life in that part of Chad. I was looking for a kind of amalgam, to show how the invisible and the visible co-exist. The people practice revealed religions, but there’s a syncretism at work, a very Chadian kind of imagery, realism as well as some sort of magic and wonder in everyday life. I was guided by the fairy tale side of things, and from there I incorporated other things while trying to strike a balance between the magic of the wonderful and realism. Because I also wanted to anchor this story in a very precise geographical area, and we needed to look to real life to explore all that. This reality allows us to look at modern life, too, and the future of this world. We mainly found that amalgam and balance in the editing phase, but they were our aims from the outset.
What were your main visual intentions in terms of the film’s monumental western decor?
The trick was to avoid slipping into picture-postcard depictions, because the site is so majestic and magnificent, it was really tempting to give in to its beauty. But I was interested in the story of that teenage girl. So we needed to strike a balance there too, between that space that she’s lost in for a time and the landscape of faces.
The film includes a direct reference to Nigerian writer Ben Okri’s novel, Astonishing the Gods.
It speaks to something profound and fundamentally African. Nowadays, identity markers in Africa have more to do with revealed religions than any real Africanness. There’s a kind of flight forwards, but I think we need to remember the world of the past. I’d wanted to tell a story like this, with poetry, for years. From the moment we broach these legends, these wonderful and fantastic tales, the doors to freedom open. And there’s nothing like the freedom that comes with creating. Realism is always really quick to bring credibility, whereas the fantastic and the wonderful are free from all that.
It’s a tone which runs slightly counter to contemporary cinema trends…
When everything’s the same, when everything is standardised, what matters are voices, music that’s different and dissonant. Where I come from, where I make films, in Chad, that singularity is vital if you want to make it onto the world map. Because I sometimes get the impression that I’m seeing films with dominant imagery and stories shot on the other side of the world, Hollywood movies, whereas they’re actually shot in the global South. An entire imaginary approach has been drawn upon, simply because people want to win over viewers. But creation is also a space for resistance. And to resist is to do things differently, to suggest something else.
(Translated from French)
