Daratt (2006), is the third feature-length film by the Chadian filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. A hybrid revenge/quest/coming-of-age narrative that takes place in the aftermath of Chad’s long civil conflict, the film follows sixteen-year-old Atim (Ali Barkai), whose name means “orphan,” as he fulfills the demand of his blind grandfather, Guma Abatcha (Khayar Oumar Defallah) that he avenge the killing of his father, Guma’s son. Atim journeys from his home in Abéché in the Ouaddaï region of northeastern Chad to Moussoro, a market town north of the capital, Ndjamena, where he meets Nassara (Youssouf Djaoro), his father’s killer. Nassara, who during the war had the reputation of being a brutal killer, has returned to his former life as a baker and is newly married and expecting a child. Unaware of Atim’s identity, Nassara takes him on as an apprentice. He teaches Atim a trade and provides him with the paternal authority and identity Atim seems to lack. Ultimately, Atim, who is deeply conflicted about his position in Nassara’s life, his loyalties to his grandfather, and his own identity, lures Nassara into the desert between Moussoro and Abéché and reveals his identity. He points his father’s gun at him but shoots into the air, perhaps convincing his grandfather he has achieved revenge, although this is never clear. Nassara is left on the ground, prostrate but alive.

Daratt is the second film in a trilogy that also contains Our Father (Abouna, 2002) and A Screaming Man (L’Homme qui crie, 2010) all of which focus on crises of paternity, masculinity, and identity in conflict and postconflict settings. Like all of Haroun’s films, Daratt is visually stunning, hauntingly silent, and inevitably contemplative. It is also a quintessentially urban film that both records and interrogates urban spaces and their relationship to their inhabitants in ways that are evocative of the films of Raj Kapoor, François Truffaut, and Spike Lee.

The history of conflict in Chad and the amnesty figure prominently in the opening sequence. Here a blend of genres foregrounds the burdens inherited by the postconflict generation in war-torn societies and interrogates the ways in which they come to terms with the national and personal scars inflicted by war. Atim, for example, enacts the revenge narrative, but it is not his own narrative, but rather a narrative imposed upon him by a vengeful patriarch. Like most soldiers in war zones, he is sent as a sacrifice to a conflict he neither embraces nor understands. The coming-of-age narrative is his own, and he follows it nearly to the letter—the move to the city, the apprenticeship, and even the internal transformation. However, this narrative, too, is incomplete. In the end, both of these genres are truncated, amputated—like the grandfather, who is blind, and Nassara, who needs a medical device in order to speak—by the war story that preceded them. Seeing either of them to completion is to validate one side or the other in the conflict, to legitimize the brutality and injustice of the war, and probably to guarantee its continuation.

Thus Daratt suggests that no single genre is capable of capturing the reality of a postconflict society or the generation borne of it. It is on this generation, the film suggests, and its ability to navigate the impossible and conflicting duties, demands, emotions, and narratives of war and reconciliation, that permanent peace depends. Atim seems, through great personal turmoil, to come to terms with reconciliation by symbolically imposing upon Nassara a loss equivalent to that of his grandfather. However, in the process he sacrifices himself, becoming doubly an orphan, losing both his real father and the symbolic father who is the only father figure he has known. Atim, then, also experiences an amputation, creating an equivalency among all parties in the civil war’s economy of loss, an equivalency from which, perhaps, it is possible to rebuild.

The stark immediacy and the obvious political relevance of Daratt’s narrative grant it a grim poetic beauty that is reflected in the film’s careful choreography of image and sound. Like Haroun’s other films, Daratt minimizes dialogue while elevating ambient or background noise to symbolic status. The tranquility of Nassara’s traditional bakery, for example, is shattered by the loud horn of a bakery delivery truck belonging to a newer, mechanized bakery. Through this contrast of sound and silence, and the accompanying juxtaposition of customers at the bakery truck with an absence of customers at Nassara’s bakery, it becomes clear that the vicious circles explored in the film extend beyond family relationships or military conflicts. Nassara’s bakery, a space where Atim learns to produce something communal that is beyond his own limited sphere, becomes emblematic of an economy of production in which value is added to society. It contrasts with the circular economy of the marketplace in which Atim resells stolen light bulbs and ballasts, the economy of the zero-sum game. The bakery, quite apart from the sins of its proprietor, symbolizes the value in Chadian society, its potential to move forward, grow, and contribute. The space of the bakery is disrupted not only by the war in the film’s prehistory, but also by the disruptions of globalization symbolized by the bakery truck. Thus the film reminds us that war and fragmentation in Chad are not solely the product of internal forces, and that even if the conflict has ended, the external influence of disruption remains in place.

Ultimately Daratt, as its title suggests, explores a moment of liminality, an in-between period that characterizes not only postconflict Chad, or even postcolonial Africa, but most contemporary societies, which find themselves dominated by forces of change and disruption, riven by intergenerational conflicts, destabilized by dramatic shifts in the structure of authority. It is a quintessentially postmodern film about the in-between times, the dry seasons, when things are ending and restarting. What such seasons mean, the film reminds us, can’t be determined until the arrival of the next season, in a future that can’t be seen from the diegetic space in which we all move. In those times it is an act of faith to believe that peace holds, that reconciliation is possible, and that sacrifices bring redemption. We are all left waiting for the rains to start and to see what they leave behind when they end.