Lac (2019)
★★½ — Lac (2019)
At just eight minutes long, Lac sits at the shorter end of what most people would recognise as a film, but Mahamat-Saleh Haroun has never been a director who measures worth in running time. The Chadian filmmaker, probably best known internationally for features such as Lingui, the Sacred Bonds, shot this short documentary in 2019 with backing from the European Union. It is set in and around Bol, the provincial capital on the western shore of Lake Chad, and its subject is both quietly personal and geographically vast: the slow, measurable retreat of one of Africa's great bodies of water, and what that loss means for the communities whose livelihoods have depended on it for generations.
Lake Chad itself is not a neutral backdrop. Scientists and environmental organisations have tracked its contraction for decades, with the lake losing the overwhelming majority of its surface area since the 1960s due to a combination of climate change, population pressure, and irrigation demands. That context sits behind every frame of Lac, though Haroun keeps his focus human rather than statistical. The film follows Kellou, a fisherwoman in her forties who learned her trade from her own mother, and whose daughter, twelve-year-old Mouna, is the source of the small but striking idea at the film's centre. What production details are available suggest a lean, purposeful shoot, which is consistent with Haroun's working method across his career. For those who want a broader sense of documentary filmmaking coming out of the region during this period, the blog's review of Talking About Trees, another Chadian film from the same year, offers an interesting point of comparison.
As a piece of documentary work, Lac sits alongside other short-form films that use a single family or individual to open a window onto something much larger. It is the kind of film that tends to find its audience through festivals and curated programmes rather than mainstream release, which perhaps explains why it remains relatively little seen outside specialist circles. Whether it manages to do what the best short documentaries do, which is to make eight minutes feel sufficient and not merely truncated, is exactly the kind of question worth putting to a film like this. On that note, if you are curious how another tightly focused documentary handles the intersection of environment, community, and survival, the review of Island Soldier covers similar thematic ground from a very different part of the world.
A-Z World Movie Tour Chad https://youtu.be/A2BfPJOnmcY?feature=shared Do yourself a favour. Don't read the synopsis. Just watch. If you read the description above it'll tell you basically everything that happens. It's super short. Literally 8 minutes long, but you can't really fault anything in that 8 minutes. Cinematography is beautiful. A glimpse into life in Chad which is otherwise super rare. The story is a commentary on the struggle of pollution and the resilience and innovation to attempt to proper from it.
For me, that tension between brevity and substance is what lingers. Eight minutes is barely enough time to settle into a film, and yet when the filmmaking is as considered as it is here, it turns out to be enough. I find myself thinking that the restrained approach actually serves the material: there is no padding, no attempt to over-explain what the images are already doing. It is a reminder that some of the most honest documentary work comes in small packages, and that Chad, a country so rarely given screen time of any kind, deserves more of it. Go in without reading too much. That really is the best advice anyone can give you.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2025-05-31
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Chad: Talking About Trees (2019)
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