Freedom doesn’t come easily in ‘Lingui, the Sacred Bonds’, an electrical liberation story about a mother and daughter. It is fought for – and seized – by women who, by saving themselves, save each other. For the daughter, autonomy means ensuring an abortion in a country that forbids it. For the mother, an observant Muslim woman, self-sovereignty is a revolutionary act that requires a change in thinking and being. It means saying no, dancing, secretly smoking and fighting when necessary. It means finding new ways to be a woman in these men’s world.
The story is set in present-day N’Djamena, Chad, where Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane) spends much of her time making ends meet. With her 15-year-old daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio), Amina lives in a simple house with a rickety gate, thick walls and a sweet, playful dog and charming kitten. For money, Amina makes small, ingeniously designed coal stoves with steel wires that she meticulously saves from old car and truck tires she buys. When she’s made enough, she covers her head and body, carefully balances the stoves on her head, and wanders the city selling them for the equivalent of a few dollars.
The family’s domestic tranquility is already disturbed when the story begins, although as Amina you are in the dark about what went wrong. However, the writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun is a quick worker – the film is only 90 minutes long – and he quickly outlines the story and the stark commitment to both mother and daughter. Maria has been expelled from school because she is pregnant. (“It’s bad for our image,” a school official explains coolly.) Maria doesn’t want to name the father. And she doesn’t want a child, partly because she doesn’t want to end up like Amina, who suffered because she was a single mother.
As in the American independent film “Never Rarely, Sometimes Always,” the battle to get a safe abortion here is difficult, life-changing, and profound. Narrative, the effort to quickly secure one takes the form of an odyssey, a journey full of setbacks, harrowing threats and gender-based hurdles. For Amina, these obstacles include the government’s ban on abortion, empty pockets, wagging fingers and head shaking. There is the imperious Imam (Saleh Sambo) who questions her faith; and there’s the annoying neighbor (Youssouf Djaoro) who likes to flirt with her, but won’t lend her money.