So writes acclaimed author Malcolm Harris in his new book, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis, succinctly distilling the thrust of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s 2013 film, GriGris. Harris’s book takes on one of the most intractable problems of the contemporary world—climate change—and offers a rigorous, accessible, and clear-eyed analysis of our ways out of it. GriGris is among the many movies that make cameos throughout the book, vividly illustrating one of Harris’s key ideas: the “Oil-Value-Life” chain, a system that entangles life so inextricably with market value that the excessive production of a highly profitable, and essential, commodity like oil becomes near-impossible to disrupt. 

In Haroun’s thriller, which premiered at Cannes in 2013, a Chadian dancer is forced to take up petrol smuggling to pay for his stepfather’s medical expenses. Inspired by real-life car chases that Haroun witnessed in Chad between police and petrol smugglers, and made a decade into Chad’s oil boom, the film demonstrates both the false promises of the global fossil-fuel industry—how it exacerbates inequality rather than alleviating it—and a way out of its traps: a social system where market value is subordinated to social values, and where the collective good is prioritized over individual gains. As Harris writes of the stirring conclusion of GriGris: “Many sticks can not only beat one gun, they can also smash the capitalist chain.”

Join Film Comment for a screening of GriGris and an extended conversation (45m) with Malcom Harris and Ugandan writer and scholar Anselm Kizza-Besigye about What’s Left and cinematic representations of the climate crisis.

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