Writer and film director Haroun makes films about his homeland, Chad, and his second feature film, Abouna, which means Our Father in Arabic, set in and around Chad's capital N'djamena, was screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2002. The film is the story of two African brothers whose father ups and leaves one day, devastating their family life - a tale of lost innocence and heart-breaking emotionally and visually - a nugget of pure humanism. But the film can be understood as an allegory for the fate of Chad, a French colony until 1960 and subsequently riven by three decades of civil war and ethnic rebellions. The country, like the boys, is lost and fatherless. Haroun's first short film Bye Bye Africa, made in Chad, won two awards at 1999 Venice film festival. He had his five-year stint as a reporter on the local papers and radio of Bordeaux, France, where he lived for the past two decades. Haroun was born in Chad and later on studied in France.