Chad’s Culture Minister Mahamat Haroun in focus at IFFK

How does it feel to be the first filmmaker from your country? When Mahamat Saleh Haroun from Chad made Bye Bye Africa, the challenge of taking up something unprecedented and the immense freedom provided by that blank slate rested easy on him.

Appointed the Culture Minister of his country earlier this year, he is one of the filmmakers in focus at this year’s International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK).

As a 17-year-old student, caught amid the civil war that ravaged Chad in the 1980s, he had no option but to flee, moving across borders to Cameroon, and then to Libya, and finally ending up in Paris.

Working in odd jobs, he worked towards a dream that was kindled in him, when he was a nine-year-old.

“When I was nine-years-old, one of my crazy uncles took me to the only cinema theatre in Chad. We didn’t have any cinema of our own. Bollywood and Hollywood films were screened there. Imagine, you are so young, you have seen no television, no smartphone, you didn’t even know that something called cinema existed. It was a magical experience. It was a Hindi movie and I remember the face of an actor whom I believe to be Hema Malini. The image remained etched in my mind,” says Haroun, in an interview to The Hindu.

In Paris, he headed to the film school, which he had found mentioned by an African filmmaker in a magazine.

His first film Bye Bye Africa, was a personal journey, which touched upon the closing down of the ravages that his country and cinema was facing. Though he has lived in France, until recently, most of his films were set in his home country.

“I make movies in Chad because I want to see images from my native country being represented. I felt that it was a kind of duty, that I have to tell these stories. If not me, hardly anyone would. No one outside really cares, if we don’t have movies,” he says.

His 2010 film The Screaming Man that won the Jury prize at the Cannes, changed things for the better for cinema back home.

Inspired by his win, the State government decided to renovate the only cinema theatre in the country that had closed down during the civil war — the Normandie theatre in the capital N'Djamena. The Screaming Man was the first film to be screened there.

This year, he made the film A Season in France. As the Culture Minister, his immediate project is to build a film school in the country, so there will be more voices to represent his country in world cinema.