Mahamat Saleh-Haroun, the great Chad filmmaker, won awards here a few years ago with A Screaming Man. His first-class new picture is a simpler, less obscure piece. But it still has plenty to say about social exclusion and the current condition of Africa. Charismatic non-professional Soulémane Démé plays the title character, a dancer coping brilliantly with a withered leg. One of the lesser themes of Grigris is the need to make and do in this society. Vehicles are patched together. The black market fills economic gaps. Grigris improvises a style of dancing that makes positive advantage of his disability: the leg is whirled around like a baton; at one stage it stands in for a machine gun.

It looks as if the hero is getting on reasonable well with his humble life. He gets tips in the disco. He works in his stepfather’s photography studio. His mother takes in laundry. They’re getting by – surviving, at any rate — until financial pressures trigger a catastrophe. In order to raise money for his stepfather’s medical bills and to help out a local girl he fancies, the hero signs up to work with a gang of petrol smugglers. Soon, his life is in danger.

Cinematic purists will find much to admire in Saleh-Haroun’s gift for composition. Keeping the camera relatively still, he arranges trees and characters with the balanced grace of a great stills photographer. But the film is also a properly gripping story of folly, courage and pursuit. Though given little dialogue, Grigris emerges as a nuanced, eccentric hero, about whom it is impossible not to care.

Some may find the ending just the tiniest bit convenient. And yet, urging unity between the more sat-upon elements in Chad society, the final outpouring of righteous violence is very much in tune with the rest of this generous, inclusive film. Let’s hear it for the weak and the disenfranchised.