Review: Soumsoum, the Night of the Stars
- BERLINALE 2026: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun explores the role and place of the wonderful and the invisible in a gloriously directed film which urges us to read between the lines
"There was a free world before them. I carried it for a long time. Now it’s your turn to carry it." Throughout his fiction career (from Daratt – Dry Season [+see also:
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interview: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
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The film unfolds amidst myths and legends (with a clear nod to Ben Okri’s novel, Astonishing the Gods), following in the wake of a modern-day teen and set against a desertic Chad which has been rocked by flooding caused by climate change. We follow an initiatory journey: one person’s attempt to find themselves, brought about by perturbing prophetic visions and an urgent need to walk away from the beliefs and collective fears which ultimately lead to scapegoating. It’s a trajectory set against such spectacular scenery (the Ennedi plateau, a succession of mountains in the Sahara in north-eastern Chad, with its canyons, cliffs, natural arches, caves and hidden water features) that it seems to exude an air of eternity rather than speaking to human unrest.
"I have dreams. I see events before they happen." A youngster like any other, with her mobile phone and her boyfriend, Baba, young schoolgirl Kellou (Maïmouna Miawama) senses that nothing will ever be the same again in her small village, which has just been severely impacted by the torrential rain of 1 September 2024. But she’s mostly, secretly concerned about the troubling visions she’s experiencing, and the (psychological and social) stigma of her mother dying while giving birth to her: Kellou is "born from blood". Is this a strength or a curse? An encounter with Aya (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane) - a woman considered to be a witch and ostracised by locals - helps clarify her perception of the ties in the living world and in visible and invisible worlds. But she needs to make some major decisions…
Lost souls, Rocher de l’Aigle, Grotte des Dames Sentinelles, children of the moon, the festival of masks, stars conveying the voice of the shadow… Mahamat-Saleh Haroun summons an entire cosmogony of wonders and tales which he gently weaves into the ceremonial blanket of a realism awash with symbolic figures (which say far more than we think about modern-day Chad, the place of women, syncretism, xenophobia, etc.). This extreme simplicity is woven into a splendid mise en scène approach which sees faces filmed as if landscapes and extraordinary landscapes (reminiscent of Monument Valley for John Ford) as if characters. It’s a brilliantly restrained feature film and a conduit of timelessness which is destined for an occult cinematographic fraternity and whose highly unusual narrative style might disconcert one or two viewers, despite the fact that "there was a world before them, a world they scorn because they’re unaware of its riches, that world that says something about us and out past."
Soumsoum, the Night of the Stars was produced by French firm Pili Films in executive co-production with Chad’s Goï-Goï Productions. Films Boutique are steering world sales.
(Translated from French)
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