Haroun himself plays the lead role in Bye Bye Africa: a filmmaker, born in Chad but now living and working in France, receives a phone call late one night with the news that his mother has died. The director goes home for the first time in a decade to confront his ambivalence about his native land, and his native land's ambivalence about movies and movie making. A remarkable mix of documentary, narrative and film essay, Bye Bye Africa is at once a fictionalized autobiography, a history of filmgoing in Chad, and a philosophical and political consideration on the complex interplay between cinema, modernity and contemporary Africa.