Lac (2019)
★★½ — Lac (2019)
Right, do me a favour. If you've not seen Lac yet, stop reading now. Go and watch it. It's eight minutes long. You've got the time. I'll wait.
Back? Good. Here's the thing: the synopsis floating around out there basically tells you everything that happens. And for a film this short, that's almost criminal. The whole experience hinges on a quiet reveal, a small but affecting moment that lands with considerably more weight if you've gone in cold. So if you haven't taken my advice and watched it first, just know that I warned you.
This is part of my A-Z World Movie Tour, working my way through films from every country I can find, and Chad is not a nation with a deep well of cinema to draw from. Finding anything at all was a mission in itself. But Lac turned up, and for eight minutes of short filmmaking, it earns its place.
What strikes you immediately is how beautiful it looks. The cinematography is genuinely lovely. There's a stillness to the images, a patience in how the camera sits with its surroundings, that feels earned rather than showy. Chad is a country you rarely see on screen at all, let alone treated with this kind of quiet care, and that alone makes Lac worth your time. It's a glimpse into a place and a way of life that most of us will never encounter anywhere else in film. That's not nothing. In fact, for a project like my world tour, that's quite a lot.
The story, without giving the game away, is rooted in something real and pressing: the slow environmental collapse of Lake Chad, one of Africa's great bodies of water, which has shrunk dramatically over recent decades due to a combination of climate change, irrigation demands and regional pressure. The film uses that context to say something about pollution, about survival, and about the kind of scrappy, determined innovation that emerges when people are left with no other options. It's a commentary told with very little dialogue and a lot of atmosphere, and for the most part that approach works.
The rating of two and a half stars might look like faint praise, but I want to be honest about what that means here. There's nothing wrong with Lac. Nothing I could sit and pick apart. The craft is solid, the intention is clear, the setting is extraordinary. But eight minutes is eight minutes, and there's only so much space for a film to build anything lasting. I appreciated it more than I was moved by it, which keeps it sitting in that middling zone where respect and genuine enthusiasm don't quite line up. I admire what it's doing. I'm glad it exists. I'm less sure it's something I'll return to.
It reminds me a little of the experience I had watching Talking About Trees, another film rooted in African filmmaking that carries real weight simply by existing, by insisting on its own place in a world that doesn't always make room for it. Both films ask you to pay attention to something you might otherwise overlook entirely.
If you're on a similar world cinema mission to me, or you're just curious about a part of the world rarely captured on film, then Lac is absolutely worth eight minutes of your evening. Keep expectations proportional to the runtime, skip the synopsis, and let it do its thing.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2025-05-31
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Chad: Talking About Trees (2019)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More documentary: Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Style Wars (1983) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)
