Earlier this month, Film Comment hosted the author Malcolm Harris for a special event celebrating the launch of his latest book, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis—an invigorating analysis of climate change and the collective solutions required to rescue humanity from it. In addition to being a trenchant public intellectual, Harris is also a dedicated cinephile who often uses movies to make sense of politics and history—something we explored on a 2023 Podcast focused on his previous book, Palo Alto: The History of California, Capitalism, and the World.
One film Harris discusses in detail in his latest book is Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s GriGris. It’s a sensuous, suspenseful thriller about a disabled dancer in Chad who takes up petrol smuggling in order to pay for his stepfather’s medical expenses. As Harris describes in his book, it’s also an incredibly intelligent movie about the life-and-death stakes of the petrochemical industry, especially in the Global South. To dig deeper into Harris’s unique attraction to the film, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute invited him to present a screening of GriGris, followed by a panel discussion with Harris and Ugandan scholar Anselm Kizza-Besigye. The group dug into movie’s alluring classical structure and its explosive conclusion, cinematic portrayals of the climate crisis, and much more.
