Lingui, The Sacred Bonds Review: Honoring the Ties That Bind a Nation’s Women

The material realities of being a woman in the central African nation of Chad are expressed with profound sympathy in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Lingui, The Sacred Bonds. Eschewing the pat melodrama of victimhood and righteous triumph through suffering, the film depicts oppression as a constant struggle between pernicious forms of power and capable, resourceful women. That is to say that here, though a few tears are shed, it’s not on the women to prove through their agony that they deserve something better.

Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane) is a single mother living in a Muslim community in N’Djamena. To get by, Amina takes the steel wires from old car tires and weaves them into baskets. Haroun foregrounds the patient work that defines her day-to-day life, imbuing it with dignity by focusing on the precise, attentive detail that goes into everything from sharpening homemade knives to the plier-assisted winding of the wire around metal framework. Through her ingenious reworking of industrial products, Amina earns enough to support herself and her 15-year-old daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio), but even within this space that they’ve carved out for themselves they still face the barriers of social, economic, and religious power.

Amina’s self-sufficiency is shown to clash with the expectations of religion, state, and community that she be little more than an extension of man—or of God. The opening scene’s depiction of her crafting process is followed by a series of scenes in which men attempt to impose their control on her. Local market bigwig Brahim (Youssef Djaoro) has been trying to get Amina to marry him for some time—and unlike the other men in the village, or so he claims, he accepts her as a single mother. Later, a local imam (Saleh Sambo) stops her, wanting to know why she’s isn’t attending prayers. (There’s more than a little irony in the earlier shot of Amina rolling out a rug and praying outside the mosque, as women aren’t allowed inside.) And after Amina has silently accepted the imam’s admonishment and turns away to walk home, the shot lingers so that we see Brahim jogging out of the mosque to catch up with her.

Haroun economically but poetically establishes that the walls are closing in on Amina and Maria, whom she calls Mamita, using the close passageways formed by the densely textured clay buildings that make up their area of N’Djamena. Amina and Maria are often framed against these bulbous tan walls, which almost look like they’re melting in the heat. And when the two venture out from this space, they’re often on the run, as in Amina chasing after Maria when the girl heads to school because she suspects something is going on with her, or Maria running against the flow of traffic to escape her mother and, later, a police raid.

When it’s revealed that Maria has become pregnant and wants to have an abortion, Amina is initially furious, pelting her daughter with blows. But when she reflects and considers that she doesn’t want Maria to face derision or hostility for being a single mother, she reverses course, taking on the state, the local imam, and Brahim in order to ensure her daughter a happy future. Though abortion is treated as a criminal act in Chad, it’s illicitly provided in the backrooms of both clinics and homes. The middle stretch of Lingui takes us, in a series of sobering steps, through the agonizing, sometimes death-defying process of seeking an abortion in a place where it is at once the gravest sin and one of the oldest folk practices.

While he attunes the viewer to the everyday rhythms and practices of life for lower-class women, Haroun doesn’t entirely work in the register of realism. Episodes like Amina and Maria inexplicably getting lost in a labyrinth of paths they walk every day make for memorable symbols of the difficult journey that the pair have been forced onto. And while Haroun’s imagery adeptly moves us from grounded reality to evocative metaphor, the storytelling doesn’t always seamlessly blend realism and contrivance. A development involving a blatant deus ex machina in the form of a conveniently wealthy blood relation (Briya Gomdigue) almost undermines the rooting of the story in the everyday world that Haroun establishes early on.

Nevertheless, as Lingui culminates in a revelation whose seeds Haroun has been deftly planting throughout, the overall power of his plotting becomes evident. The conclusion plays out, in a manner somehow both chilling and hopeful, the dialectic between the official, patriarchal community—hypocritical and inherently fractured—and the oppositional “sacred bonds” between women. While the power between these sides remains plainly imbalanced, Lingui suggests that nobody’s been finally defeated, and that the struggle is real.