Dry Season

I found this Directors first film, Abouna, utterly delightful on the second viewing, the first it dragged and I found myself checking my watch. Personally,I think there's a need to get into a different mindset for African films, they move at a much slower pace.

There are a handful of films from Africa that can leap out like a big cat from the celluloid jungle and make the viewer think. A recent example is Daratt (Dry Season), a movie from Chad, a Central African country that was initially economically weakened by the French colonial rule and later, after gaining independence, slumped into a 40-year-old civil war.

Perhaps the stereotypes of Americans being impatient with storytelling and in need of action is true. i found myself perpetually bored by this film.

Dry Season is an interesting little pot-boiler of human emotion. It begins with a fair degree of hatred, before moulding into a film in which its lead must attain a certain respect.

The Chadian film Daratt was shown in the U.S.