by Hudson Moura
Written and directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Soumsoum, the Night of the Stars is a film from Tchad of remarkable beauty and fluidity, built around a world in which everyday reality, ancestral knowledge, the dead, dreams, and the invisible coexist naturally. Rather than treating these elements as fantasy, Haroun presents them as part of a cultural understanding of life in which the visible and invisible worlds are constantly connected.
At the centre is Kellou, a young woman who has carried the stigma of being a “blood girl” since birth because her mother died giving birth to her. The village associates her with misfortune, and that prejudice also affects her love for Baba, whose father refuses to accept her as a suitable partner for his son. Kellou herself remains connected to her dead mother through dreams and visions, and she is told that her mother wants her to follow them.
Her story becomes even more powerful through her relationship with Aya, an older woman whom villagers accuse of bringing disaster to the community. An elder tells Aya to return where she came from, blaming her for trees that no longer grow and babies who die. When Kellou defends her, the hostility of the village turns toward Kellou and her family as well. She therefore becomes a young woman willing to confront the authority of the elders and the patriarchal rules of her community in the name of what she believes is morally right.
What makes the film particularly rich is that Haroun does not simply oppose a young woman to an ignorant tradition. On the contrary, Soumsoum is deeply respectful of the knowledge contained within oral African cultures. The stars communicate with the dead; dreams carry messages; nature, ancestors, memory, and everyday existence are inseparable. As Aya teaches Kellou, what happens in the visible world has consequences in the invisible one, because all living things are secretly connected. A stone, a plant, or an insect contains something of the whole, and destroying one part means damaging everything around it.
This gives the film an extraordinary cultural depth. The story is original, but it works almost like a cultural palimpsest, bringing together personal experience, Chadian oral traditions, spirituality, mythology, echoes of tragedy, African literature, and contemporary questions involving climate, patriarchy, exclusion, and the conflict between the individual and the community. Haroun developed the story with Laurent Gaudé, and these different layers seem to coexist rather than compete with one another.
Most impressive is how naturally all this knowledge enters the film. Soumsoum contains an enormous amount of history, spirituality, cultural memory, beliefs, fears, teachings, and inherited wisdom, yet it never becomes didactic. The direction remains smooth and visually expressive, allowing stories and images to suggest dimensions that extend far beyond the immediate narrative.
The film is therefore much more than a forbidden-love story or a coming-of-age drama. Through Kellou, Haroun explores what happens when inherited traditions become both a source of knowledge and a mechanism of exclusion. Her resistance does not require abandoning her culture; instead, she draws upon another dimension of that same inheritance—its relationship with nature, ancestors, dreams, and the invisible—to challenge fear, prejudice, and patriarchal authority.
Soumsoum, the Night of the Stars is a beautiful, intelligent, and remarkably fluid film, capable of making an entire cultural universe feel present without explaining it from the outside. Its greatest achievement is perhaps precisely this: it contains an extraordinary amount of knowledge while allowing that knowledge to remain alive within the characters, the landscape, the stories, and the stars.
Rating: 4.5/5