Country guide · Africa
5 Essential Films from Chad + 1 Movie Set in or About Chad
Chad on the atlas: the strongest films of its own cinema, and the films the rest of the world has set there. Every list is curated and ranked by hand.
5 Essential Films from Chad
Native cinema in Chad’s own creative voice — the passport route that earns visas and citizenship.
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1. Bye Bye Africa
A Chadian filmmaker living in France returns home after his mother's death and is shaken by the decay of his country and its cinema, resolving to make a film in her memory. A pioneering, reflexive work and one of Chad's first features, from Mahamat-Saleh Haroun.
Curator’s note: Bye Bye Africa was retained after direct comparison with Chad's researched feature pool for craft, enduring reputation or cult standing, influence, and importance within the country's cinema.
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2. Daratt
After a forty-year civil war, Chad amnesties its war criminals — so a blind grandfather sends his teenage grandson to the capital to find and kill the man who murdered the boy's father. But the youth finds his target harder to hate than he expected. A spare, gripping drama.
Curator’s note: Daratt was retained after direct comparison with Chad's researched feature pool for craft, enduring reputation or cult standing, influence, and importance within the country's cinema.
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3. A Screaming Man
A proud former swimming champion who works as a hotel pool attendant loses his job to his own son amid economic cutbacks, and, pressured to prove his loyalty as war closes in, makes a wrenching choice. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's quietly devastating drama.
Curator’s note: A Screaming Man was retained after direct comparison with Chad's researched feature pool for craft, enduring reputation or cult standing, influence, and importance within the country's cinema.
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4. Daresalam
Two childhood friends in Chad join a rebel movement against a corrupt government, but the long war and its compromises slowly drive them apart. A drama about idealism and disillusionment in armed struggle.
Curator’s note: Daresalam was retained after direct comparison with Chad's researched feature pool for craft, enduring reputation or cult standing, influence, and importance within the country's cinema.
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5. DP75: Tartina City
In a fictional African dictatorship, a man returns from exile and is caught in the machinery of a brutal police state, confronting torture, betrayal, and the ghosts of his past. A Chadian political drama.
Curator’s note: DP75: Tartina City was retained after direct comparison with Chad's researched feature pool for craft, enduring reputation or cult standing, influence, and importance within the country's cinema.
1 Movie Set in or About Chad
Outside filmmakers looking toward Chad: optional perspectives for a wider journey.
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1. The Roots of Heaven
In French Equatorial Africa, an idealistic conservationist wages a lonely crusade to save the elephants from hunters and poachers, drawing an unlikely band of misfits and adventurers to his cause. John Huston's sprawling adventure drama.
Curator’s note: The Roots of Heaven was retained as one of the strongest foreign-authored films whose setting, history, people, or sustained subject materially engages with Chad.
Selected by the FilmsAroundThe.World editorial desk
Lists are ranked for craft, enduring reputation, influence, and depth of engagement with place. Native selections require a verified creative relationship to the country; souvenir selections require an outside creative lead and a country-centered story. Read the methodology.
Editorial review: 2026-07-14
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