Soumsoum, The Night of the Stars

Drama

Already released · Theatrical Apr 22, 2026 (FR)

Programme: Centrepiece
Year: 2026
Runtime: 101 min
Country: Chad, France
Language: Arabic / French
Premiere: North American Premiere
TMDB rating: 6.0 (1 votes)
In cinemas: Apr 22, 2026 (FR)

Seventeen-year-old Kellou has been gifted with supernatural powers she does not understand. Her disquiet and uncertainty only change when she meets Aya. It is an encounter with destiny that forges a mystical world where the visible and invisible converge.

From the TIFF programme

Five years after Lingui, the Sacred Bonds, Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun returns to TIFF with his latest feature, winner of the FIPRESCI Award at the 2026 Berlinale.

Twenty years after his masterpiece Dry Season (TIFF ’06), Mahamat-Saleh Haroun has changed course. After men's revenge, set in an urban setting, comes women's wrath, set in a rural setting. By choosing a legendary sandstone massif located in northeastern Chad, the Ennedi plateau, Haroun aims to depict both the loneliness of characters cut off from their communities and the power of human connections that have bridged the past and the present for millennia.

Kellou (Maïmouna Miawama), a young adult living alone with her father (Ériq Ebouaney, Lumumba, TIFF ’00), has haunting visions. She can see the past but also the future — a gift that no one looks upon favorably and that must not be revealed. In her village, Kellou lives, runs, thrives, and above all, loves. But Kellou is mocked as a “girl of blood,” the daughter of a woman who died in childbirth.

Struggling with this ostracism, Kellou meets Aya (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane, Lingui, TIFF ’21 ), a single woman who has been herself rejected by the community that blames her for all its ills. As they grew closer, Aya teaches Kellou how to shape her view of the world.

Taking a realistic approach to the fantasy genre (including a reference to the Nigerian-British author Ben Okri), Haroun drew inspiration from the fortune-tellers of his childhood, as well as from the place the dead held in everyday life. By choosing to shoot his film not far from where the remains of Toumaï, the first hominid, were discovered, Haroun invites us to engage in philosophical reflection on the world of the living and the dead.

CLAIRE DIAO