Streaming Midnight Hot

Daratt of Mohamed Salah Haroun


The Day the Truth and Reconciliation Commission announced on the radio a general amnesty in Chad to all criminals in the civil war that has gripped the country in the 80s, a great father orders his grand-son, Atim, to accomplish a vital mission: from Ndjamena to take revenge on the murderer of his father. On the canvas of the story which revolves between the political and the intimate, the filmmaker weaves a film of great visual beauty, which remains a fine line between overloading the senses and the sketch plans. Atim eventually trace Nassara (the feline presence of two actors alone is a splendor). It engages as an apprentice baker and teaches him the ropes.

Between Adolescent suspicious and taciturn with only obsession and revenge as the repentant murderer tries to redeem his violent past by driving pious and charitable impulses, a complex relationship settles throughout the film. In the sweltering heat of furnaces, in this mixture of sweat and toil of torpor desire for revenge, the horrors of the past and the death instincts are crumbling, are kneaded like bread to give rise to another feeling, a new awareness: that of forgiveness. The splendid beauty of the film lies in the intimate correspondence between the issue of conscience and weaving repetitive daily, between mental and manual, between the mental torture of revenge and healing in the most basic gestures. The filmmaker, in long shots and tight attentive installs these two bodies gleaming in the limited space in this promiscuity torrid gradually transformed.

It is no coincidence that the filmmaker has chosen the profession and the work of bread as a force of transmission. The scenes where both characters work side by side to give life to this elementary matter and millennium are among the finest in the whole movie, because they place the relations between the characters in this dialectic between the forces of life and the forces death. As if redemption was to first pass through the transmission of life. The theme of the transmission is also present throughout the film. The grandfather who sends in a Atim gun, a symbol of this history of violence and hatred, which opposes Nassara send a trade and gives him a way out of crime in which he had fallen on arriving in Ndjamena.

The film is rich not only in its themes and many discoveries but also by its condensation of meaning and genres: it is both a police camera, a film with multiple social and political dimensions, reflection on forgiveness and amnesty, and especially one of those films of confrontation between the characters, made silent ballet of bodies and sets of eyes hanging. It sometimes reaches such a level of abstraction one might think of an African Bergman.