Dry season drama from Chad

By Daniel Nelson Daratt (Dry Season) is the antithesis of Western film-making. It is slow, spare, measured, full of silences and ambiguities. A protest demonstration that in an American movie would have been a set-piece swirl of action and disturbance is here experienced first as the distant sound of gunfire and a hum of human voices and then as a near-static view of abandoned shoes. So if it's rapid-fire, non-stop action you want, don't bother. The film grips, nonetheless, as the boy who is sent to avenge his father's death during Chad's civil war gets a job in his potential victim's bakery and finds his will to kill wavering. The drama comes partly from a handful of incidents but mostly from composed composition, small gestures, intense close-up. Every move receives the camera's full attention: there are no peripheral distractions. Even the dialogue is sparse, with the protagonists' taciturnity accentuated by the fact that Nassara - the killer who becomes a father figure - can talk only by pressing a mechanical device to this throat, a disability inflicted in a slash attack that, like most of the film's background events, remains a mystery. N'Djamena is glimpsed as dusty streets, plastic bag litter and bullying policemen. The backdrop may be bleak, but not the feel of the film: the confrontation between Nassara and the teenage Atim is so elemental that it commands total attention. Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun even manages to fashion a "happy" ending (or, to be more precise, an ending based on a satisfactory compromise). + Next screening in London: Sunday 30 November, as part of the London African Film Festival

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