On Sunday, April 1, 2012, Cinema Art Bethesda will present  the French-Chadian film A Screaming Man (Un homme qui crie). The film is 92 minutes long and in French and Arabic with English subtitles.

Synopsis

In present-day Chad, sixty something and former swimming champion, Adam, is pool attendant at a posh N’Djamena hotel. When the hotel is taken over by new Chinese owners, Adam is forced to give up his job to his son Abdel. Adam feels socially humiliated.

In addition, the country is in the throes of a civil war. Rebel forces are attacking the government. The authorities demand that the population contribute to the “war effort”, bygiving money or or volunteering to fight off the assailants. The District Chief constantly harasses Adam for his contribution. But Adam is penniless; he only has his son.

Selected Awards and Accolades

Jury Prize
Cannes Film Festival’s

Silver Hugo for best screenplay
Chicago International Film Festival

Silver Hugo for best actor (Youssouf Djaoro)
Chicago International Film Festival

Best French-Language Film from outside France
2011 Lumière Awards

Selected Reviews

The Guardian
–Steve Rose

Chad’s resident auteur Haroun continues his advance with another small film that says a lot without looking like it’s doing a lot.

The New Yorker
–Richard Brody

With images of tense precision and humane passion, he concentrates the pressures of vast forces—the pathos of privatization and unemployment, the hell of civil war, the ferment of migration, and the eternal dramas of aging and paternity—in the intimate crises of a handful of characters who never lose their concrete specificity; he raises their drama to a universal, muffled cry of frustration and rage.

The New York Times
–Manohla Dargis

“A Screaming Man” is a quiet, tender, finally wrenching story of an individual at the intersection of the personal and the political. It’s a modest film, if only in scale and apparent budget, about some of the greatest questions in life, like the existence of God, our capacity to see beyond our own vanity and the legacies of fathers, both blood and state.

Video link

Trailer available on YouTube or watch below.