Dr. Ben (2023)
The Comoros, a small archipelago nation nestled in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and the east coast of Africa, is about as far from Hollywood as it is possible to get, in every sense. With a population of under a million people and an economy that regularly ranks among the world's most fragile, the country has produced almost nothing in the way of a domestic film industry. That context matters here. Dr. Ben (2023) arrives not as part of a rich national cinema tradition but almost as a pioneering act in itself, a short thriller that dares to put Comorian stories, Comorian faces, and Comorian locations on screen at a time when the country scarcely registers on global cinema's radar at all. For a sense of how rare African national cinemas can be in the first place, and how much creative ambition can exist on the margins, it is worth looking at what has been done elsewhere on the continent, from the Touki Bouki (1973) of Senegal to more recent efforts that push against limited resources with sheer conviction.
The film was produced through Huri TV and Piccell Studio, modest local outfits rather than any international co-production setup, which tells you something about the shoestring conditions under which it was made. Director M. Hodary, working in a country where formal film infrastructure is essentially nonexistent, took on an extraordinary range of roles behind the camera. The premise is a straightforward medical thriller in miniature: a doctor makes a fatal error in a hospital and moves to suppress the evidence, only to be watched by a nurse who is not prepared to let it go quietly. It is the kind of premise that has fuelled countless genre films in larger industries, lean and functional, the sort of story that can be told without large sets or expensive locations. At just twenty-three minutes, it sits firmly in short film territory, which brings its own particular challenges around pacing and dramatic compression. Intissam Dahilou, who plays the nurse at the centre of the story, also shares a co-writing credit on the script, giving the film a degree of collaborative ownership that feels meaningful in a production this small.
The cast is made up of local performers, including Aladine Assimakou, Soiyira Assoumani, Faiçal Ben Ahmed, and Ahmed Boulla alongside Dahilou. None of them are names familiar to international audiences, which is rather the point: this is filmmaking built from the ground up, using whoever is available and willing rather than drawing from any established pool of talent. That kind of production is not entirely without precedent in world cinema. Films like Utama (2022), which assembled its cast from non-professional indigenous Quechua speakers in the Bolivian highlands, have demonstrated what raw, genuine screen presence can contribute even when formal acting training is absent. Whether Dr. Ben achieves anything comparable is a question Macca is better placed to answer than any amount of contextual framing.
Dr. Ben (2023), a short thriller directed by M. Hodary, is only the second film from the Comoros I’ve actually been able to track down. When you're scraping the bottom of the barrel for a nation's filmography, your expectations naturally have to adjust. The film follows Dr. Ben, played by Faïçal Ben Ahmed, a physician who makes a catastrophic medical error that leads to the demise of a patient. Instead of owning up to his mistake, he covers his tracks, but his actions don't go unnoticed. His nurse, Oumilher (played by Intissam Dahilou, who also co-wrote the script), becomes suspicious of his fatal blunders and decides to launch her own dangerous investigation to expose the truth at the hospital.
Credit where it’s due, M. Hodary clearly wore almost every hat on this production, handling the directing, editing, framing, sound design, and VFX himself. For such a distinctly low-budget project, it is actually shot quite well. The cinematography captures the sterile, tense atmosphere of the medical environment reasonably effectively, and Dahilou brings a solid, grounded intensity to her role as the determined nurse. It’s a decent short film that manages to build a fair bit of suspense given the very limited resources at its disposal, and you can tell there’s a genuine passion behind the camera.
However, while it’s a respectable effort for a fledgling film industry, it ultimately falls short of being a truly gripping thriller. The low budget really shows in the finer details, and the performances, while earnest, can feel a bit stiff when the script demands high emotional stakes. It also suffers from pacing issues, feeling a bit too drawn out for a short film without the tension ever quite reaching the boiling point you want from a medical cover-up story.
Dr. Ben is a decent, well-shot little short that serves as a promising stepping stone for Comorian cinema, but as a standalone piece of suspense, it’s just a bit too rough around the edges to truly captivate.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtiLGYToUqs
What Dr. Ben represents, whatever one makes of it as a viewing experience, is the kind of early, rough-edged step that every national cinema has had to take at some point. The Comoros joins a very short list of countries whose film output is beginning to find even a modest international audience, and short-form work produced for digital distribution is, realistically, the most practical route for industries without established theatrical infrastructure. Macca has covered similarly ambitious low-resource filmmaking from underrepresented corners of the world before, including Listen to the Voices (2024), and the recurring theme is that passion and scarcity make for an unpredictable combination. Sometimes the result transcends its limitations. Sometimes it is simply a promising sketch of what might come later. Either way, the fact that someone in the Comoros is pointing a camera and telling stories feels worth noting, even if the finished film is still finding its feet. First films from new places are rarely polished. They are rarely meant to be.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2026-06-16
