AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Jenni Devyn Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

tadegeare This movie is a rather slow movie that contains a lot of, what seems like, never-ending silences. It starts off in the pool and the entire movie, and the decisions made by the characters really revolve around a pool. The father loves working at the pool and claims it is his life. But at one point his son ends up replacing him as the life guard and he is moved to the gate guard. This triggers his silence and eventually, the son is taken by the army and is drafted and the father does nothing to try and stop it. I believe this was out of greed and selfishness. The father let his son be taken so that he would get his life guard job back and to me that is ridiculous. I think this because later in the movie he regrets his decision and claims that he was wrong. He goes to save his son but he is greatly injured and on the ride back he dies. I didn't like this movie very much but the messages that are given are strong ones.

Cameron Crawford Adam is a swimming champion, who has spent his entire life at or in the pool. His son, Abdel, also loves to swim, seeing as his father raised him to be a swimmer. When the Chinese take control of the luxury hotel that Adam works at, the manager decides to make Abdel the the pool attendant instead of Adam. This crushes Adam, because he lives for the pool. During the time of this happening, a civil war is going on in Chad. The army comes to draft, and they choose to draft Abdel. Adam does nothing about it, because he wants his job of pool attendant back. When his one and only son is sent away to the war, Adam is eaten away by his guilt. Abdel later goes to the army camp to save his son, but Abdel is already on the brink of death. The director says that it was God's will to not save Abdel, because Adam did not try to save Abdel. Overall, this movie uses Adam's guilt to show that he regretted the decisions that he made as a father.

Lily Schneider "A Screaming Man," directed by Mahamat Saleh Haroun, was a very slow-paced, but somewhat moving film. The silences and actions of the characters led the viewers to conceive a message worth a million words. I thought this was a very interesting way to film, and it led me and my classmates to interpret our own messages out of the film's dialogue through the actors' eye contact. "A Screaming Man," is a puzzling film that will lead you to rethink how people around the world interact with one another -- it definitely persuaded me to find a different global perspective. This film persuades the viewers to further think about the future and well-being of our world as it is today.

Katarina Hedrén "Be careful not to cross your arms over your chest, assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, because life is not a spectacle, a sea of pain is not a proscenium, and a screaming man is not a dancing bear." (Extract from Aimé Césaire's poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1939Chadian filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's fourth feature tells the story of Adam, or "The Champ" (Youssouf Djaoro) as he is also known, a former swimming champion in his mid- fifties, who works as a hotel pool attendant; a job in which he takes immense pride. Adam's closest colleague is his son Abdel (Dioucounda Koma), a twenty year old who documents every day of his life with his camera. Father and son make a harmonious pair and their family is a happy one, despite an intensifying civil war and the plans to privatise the hotel where they work. That is until the day the hotel management's cutbacks hit the family and Abdel is made pool attendant in his father's place. The looming threats of armed rebels approaching the city offers an unfortunate opportunity for Adam to restore himself, or at least that is what he, whose identity is intrinsically tied to his job and his past achievements, thinks.A Screaming Man talks about loss of self, not as a consequence of happenings beyond our control, but of the choices we make when life throws us off guard. "Life continues", says David (Marius Yelolo), the hotel chef and Adam's close friend who is among the first to be affected by the down-sizings. Both men struggle to come to terms with the realisation that their passion and zest for life is of little value to anyone but themselves. The problem, David concludes, is that we put our destiny in God's hands – a God he still believes in but in whom he has lost faith – thus implying that there is room for human intervention regardless of the magnitude of the challenges we face. That it is in fact up to ourselves to decide what kind of person we want to be and how to express and live up to the decision once it has been made.Adam's wife (Hadje Fatime N'Goua) scolds both her husband for having changed when he meets danger with passivity, and the invisible neighbour who thinks nothing of asking for favours without ever offering anything in return. She knows that there is pride in cooking, in singing, and in caring and providing for one's family. In having a purpose, and in trying to be the best one can be. And she knows that inherent in pride is the sense of dignity that helps us to treat others and ourselves with respect. Just before we lose ourselves we lose the little things; the subtle detail, the unsaid and the almost unnoticed, like the acts of saying "thank you" after supper. Haroun evokes the ordinary, not horror or deprivation, which he merely illustrates by the absence of what used to be. The civil war, like the rationalising process at the hotel, is but a backdrop and a circumstance; not a defining factor.In his characteristic careful and understated manner Mahamat-Saleh Haroun shares the secret behind a decent life with an audience who has time for the mundane and the slow unfolding of seemingly undramatic events brimful with meaning. A secret spelled dignity and pride, be it that of a father, a professional, or a frightened man who has decided that his best years are behind him.Talented South African filmmaker Khalo Matabane once tweeted "Great art speaks to the essence of what it is to be a human being; not only material and physical aspirations but existential too." A perfect description of A Screaming Man; a brilliant work of art in its own right, and in the way the film relates to its characters' ability and need for full self-expression through cooking, singing, swimming or tending to a pool.This and other reviews available on the blog In The Words of Katarina (wordsofkatarina.blogspot.com)