88 min | NR | February 4, 2022 | MUBI
In a walled compound on the outskirts of N’Djamena, a devout single mother named Amina learns her fifteen-year-old daughter is pregnant and wants it ended. Abortion is illegal in Chad and condemned by their faith. Lingui is the word for the bonds that hold people together, and the film asks what those bonds are worth when every institution turns its back.
Amina sells handmade braziers in N’Djamena, hammering wire stove frames out of salvaged car tires. She is a single mother who has built a quiet life around prayer and labor. Then her daughter Maria turns up pregnant and expelled from school, and she wants the pregnancy gone. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun frames the central problem as a closed circuit of refusals. The mosque, the doctor, the police, and the neighbors all stand in the way, and Lingui is about the underground network of women who route around them.
Achouackh Abakar Souleymane plays Amina as a woman whose faith and her child pull in opposite directions. She holds the contradiction in her face rather than her dialogue. Souleymane lets the devotion and the defiance coexist without resolving either. Rihane Khalil Alio plays Maria with a flat, unsentimental refusal to explain herself, and the silence between mother and daughter does more work than any confession would. Youssouf Djaoro plays Brahim, a suitor and landlord whose courtesy curdles into menace, and his scenes expose how thin the line is between protection and ownership.
Haroun writes and directs with a restraint that refuses melodrama at every turn. The camera holds on Amina at her workbench and on the cinder-block geometry of the compound walls, and the production design makes confinement a physical fact. Mathieu Giombini’s cinematography saturates the daylight scenes with hard sun and dust, then shifts to deep blacks and lantern pools for the clandestine work done at night. Haroun stages the abortion network as a series of practical transactions rather than dramatic confrontations, and the matter-of-fact rhythm is the argument. The film trusts faces and rooms and lets the patriarchy condemn itself through procedure.
Lingui is a film about solidarity built in the spaces where the law and the faith leave women alone. Amina starts the film policing her daughter and ends it conspiring with strangers against the men who would decide for them both. Haroun extends the conspiracy outward until the title stops meaning the bond between mother and child and starts meaning the bond among women who have nowhere else to turn. The film makes its case quietly and never raises its voice, and that discipline is what gives the ending its force.