“Lingui,” a new movie filmed in Chad, follows a single mother who is trying to help her teen-age daughter arrange an abortion in a country where the procedure is largely illegal. The film “arrives on these shores to grim relevance,” Bruce Handy writes.
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, a writer and director, finished shooting his latest film in Chad in early 2020, just before the pandemic descended. He intended to tell a story about his country—a story that had nothing to do with the United States of America.
Also on the Zoom call, from her couch in N’Djamena, was one of the film’s two leads, Achouackh Abakar Souleymane, forty, who plays the mother, Amina. Offscreen, Achouackh owns two restaurants and is studying sociology at a local university. She has acted only once before, in a small part in Haroun’s “Grigris,” for which she also served as an assistant costumer, a job that she said she got as a sort of fluke when she dropped a friend off at a casting call.
Achouackh has a broad smile that doesn’t appear much in “Lingui,” although—wee spoiler—viewers do get a glimpse at the end. She cites Meryl Streep and Angelina Jolie as two of her favorite American actresses.
After Cannes, Haroun arranged private screenings of “Lingui” in N’Djamena. He was heartened by the responses of young men, who, he said, recognize that they are an obvious “part of the problem” when it comes to unwanted pregnancies. The screenings initially worried Achouackh. “I was very stressed out,” she said, “because in Chad, for a woman, you don’t just become an actress.
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