Ciné - Club May: Festival de Cannes

Un homme qui crie / A Screaming Man

Friday, 25 May 2012

5.30 & 7.30 pm

Director : Mahamat Saleh Haroun

2010, 92 min

What a terrible sacrifice can you do to keep your job? How far can you go to preserve the fragile balance of your life? The fourth film by Chadian Mahamat-Saleh Haroun asks these two major questions through a story of a luminous simplicity. The old lifeguard from a luxury hotel in N’Djamena, a former swimming champion for whom the pool has been all his life, is relegated to minor jobs. His son, more dynamic, has supplanted him. But a civil war is raging, a war between rival factions, without a right or a wrong camp, like a monster never satisfied, demanding its human toll.

The subject of this fable borrowed from Neorealism: indeed it deals with the matter of conscience of an oppressed man pushed to the limited, just like in silent films. The decommissioning of the hero also recalls The Last Laugh, one of the masterpieces of the German filmmaker Murnau.

The strength of the film resides in the permanent alternation between everyday situations and mythological references. This dual space has to be inhabited by powerful actors: Youssof Djaoro has a quiet strength, almost like the characters of John Ford. His pain is chilling us, and even more the verses by Aimé Césaire at the end of the film, explaining its title: “Beware of crossing your arms in the sterile pose of a spectator, for life is not a show on stage (…), for a screaming human being is not a dancing bear…”

In the 2010 Cannes Festival, the jurors have read these lines, have uncrossed their arms and A Screaming Man has won the Jury Prize.

For more information, please send an email to culture_comm@afdelhi.org