Mahamat-Saleh Haroun: Chad, mon amour

The writer/director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun makes films about his homeland, Chad, even though Chad 'has no cinema'. And despite the fact that he now lives in France in order to be near his two children. He tells Fiona Morrow about the personal pain behind his gorgeous-looking second feature

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun is nervous; his second feature film, Abouna, is about to be screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. "I hope you like it," he says, quietly. "I'm going to the bar now, to drink some whisky."

The fortification was unnecessary: he returns after the final credits to rapturous applause. Abouna is the story of two African brothers, Tahir and Amine, whose father ups and leaves one day, devastating their family life. It is a tale of lost innocence, unconditional love, and how, despite them rarely coming true, we inevitably turn to our dreams. It's a heartbreaker, emotionally and visually – a nugget of pure humanism.

Asked by an audience member who his influences are, Haroun answers without hesitation: "Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Takeshi Kitano." I have to meet this man.

The next morning, he accepts my enthusiasm gracefully. "When you give your movie and it is received well, it is the best pleasure you can feel," he proffers. "It's a question of generosity."

Born in Chad, Haroun studied in France – first film, then journalism – before a five- year stint as a reporter on the local papers and radio of Bordeaux. He directed his first short film in 1994, and Bye Bye Africa, his debut feature, in 1999. Bye Bye Africa was part-fact, part-fiction, a drama within a documentary, shot on DV.

"I received a telephone call in the night – about 4am," recalls Haroun. "It was someone telling me that my mother was dead. I went back home to Chad and I tried to make a movie about my mother and my reflections on the cinema in Chad. I played a film-maker called Haroun – I was my character. It was fiction and documentary – a movie within a movie – like a Russian doll."

The film, despite picking up two prizes at the Venice Film Festival, wasn't widely distributed. Abouna should make more impact, having received great reviews earlier this year in Cannes. "Even Variety loves this film," Haroun smiles. "Maybe I have been doing it all wrong and I should be in Hollywood..."

He doesn't mean it, of course, and, although he lives in France, he intends to continue his work in Africa: "To make a film in France about immigration or something... I'd prefer to leave that to somebody with more baggage, someone who feels more French because they were born there," he explains.

"I will keep making the films in Chad because it is important to have a window. We can lose Africa if we don't make movies about Africa," he sighs. "You make films like this and they are a thread, just a little point of view on Africa to send into the world. Otherwise, Africa will just disappear."

Yet Abouna isn't a political film; like Kiarostami, Haroun seeks common understanding through the minutiae of everyday life. "Making a movie is just like a gift for me," proffers Haroun. "I'm making things in Africa, I'm from Chad, and I bring you a gift. But I don't want to offer you something that is strange, so I have to avoid the local understanding and be universal. Still," he adds, with a smile, "you don't have to lose your soul in the process."

For him, it is about showing what is going on beyond the surface, beyond the busy, noisy, sometimes chaotic appearance of African life. "Maybe, when you see Africa you see people suffering," the director explains. "But in Chad, people don't talk about their problems, they put on a smile in society – that's the way it is. I wanted to go deeper, to find the solitude, the difficult moments."

Against such melancholy, Haroun pits a cinematic palette so rich in its colour, so gorgeous in its framing that the pain becomes palpable. "I think that when you talk about sadness, about hard things, the more you make the surroundings beautiful, then the more you feel the sadness," he nods. "The idea is to show that in Africa, sometimes the environment is an Eden, a paradise, but the reality for the people living within that environment is not a paradise – there are a lot of problems. The desire is that life could be warm like these colours. I think people react so strongly to the film because you have these incredible colours juxtaposed with these big problems – this absence of love."

Everyone surely will agree that Abouna is visually ravishing but, Haroun says, some take that to be uplifting in itself: "Some people say they think the film is very hopeful – I don't think so. Just being alive is not always hopeful, it's about people's ability to keep going despite that."

Sadly, few of Haroun's countrypeople will be able to give their thoughts on the film: "There is no cinema in Chad," Haroun explains, to my dropped jaw. "Well," he laughs, "there is one, in the French Cultural Institute, which really means there is none. The question is," he suggests, "whether it is important to make a movie if you cannot show it to your countrymen? It's like a writer who writes a book and there is no book shop, perhaps there is no reason to write."

Ask him what else he would do, however, and Haroun shrugs: "My father said to me, 'What is the need for cinema? It's nothing, you could be a doctor and maybe have saved your mother'. But the only space I have in my heart that is home, is cinema. It is not France. It is not Chad." Nowhere is that more obvious in Abouna than in the way that the two brothers deal with their longing for their father to return. They go to the movies and there, up on the screen is an actor, a man who looks a little like him; before the film is over, at least one of them is convinced that it is, in fact, he.

Cinema is, Haroun tells me, his therapy: "It's like a mirror, you see yourself, you see all the contradictions and you strive to put them in." He is separated from the mother of his children – a fact that clearly pains him – which is why he remains in France: "Racism is very present now in France, it is not a good place to be. But you go somewhere, you love somebody, you have children, that's reality – you just have to go with it. And I stay there because I love my children – I don't want to be very far from them."

"I think you can be sincere while you touch the truth," he continues, "because what you are telling is not completely fiction and others can recognise their own life in it. I dedicated the movie to my children because I know that when I left home, it was very hard for them."

Making the film was a catharsis of sorts: "It takes a long time to write, to make, to edit and then to talk about a film – it sometimes feels like a solution. It isn't really, but it feels less heavy. Sometimes you stop crying because you're writing the story down." He gives a smile full of sadness: "That's why cinema is a kind of therapy, because it can stop you crying."

'Abouna' is released on 22 November