Veteran Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun has made a pictorially elegant, gorgeously colored, radical feminist film, which, by the way, is set in what is basically a Muslim theocracy. Hallelujah. Lingui: The Sacred Bonds should have won Cannes 2021’s Palme d’Or instead of Titane, which by comparison is a tricked-out car commercial. Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane), the film’s hero, lives in a small village on the edge of Chad’s capital city with her teenage daughter Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio). When Amina was her daughter’s age, she fell in love with a man who got her pregnant and abandoned her. Disowned by her family and ignored by most of the village, she supports herself and her daughter by cutting out the metal from old tires and fashioning it into cooking stoves. It’s a hard life, so when Maria tells her that she is now pregnant and she wants to have an abortion, Amina is besides herself and lashes out at her daughter. “Abortion is a sin,” she says, and almost as soon as she speaks the words, she begins to question who is it that deems it so.
The film from this point on is focused on Amina coming to consciousness. Abortion is not illegal in Chad, but it is almost impossible to access for anyone except the very wealthy. Through an underground women’s resistance, she finds a midwife who not only performs abortions, but also, get this, fakes doing FGMs. Girls are brought to her to be cut. Outside their families wait and applaud when girls walk out. While watching the faces of the crowd, I wondered who knows and who doesn’t that they are the same as when they walked in. If this all sounds didactic, nothing could be further from the experience of Lingui. The film is not only exciting to look at, it is also emotionally volatile, and something of a thriller. Abakar is an actor of great range and intensity. As Amina’s sense of purpose grows, we understand that she is taking on not only individual creeps (the Iman, the rich guy who pursues her in order to “protect” her) but the law of the father itself.
Lingui: The Sacred Bonds opens today at Film Forum and expands to other cities February 18 before streaming on MUBI March 8.
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