CAIRO, Jan 23, 2021 (BSS/AFP) – Sudanese filmmakers who celebrated the end of
stifling restrictions following the ouster of autocrat Omar al-Bashir have
won multiple international awards but are yet to enjoy the same recognition
at home.
Cinema languished in the North African country through three decades of
authoritarian rule by Bashir.
But Sudanese took to the streets to demand freedom, peace and social
justice, and Bashir’s ironfisted rule came to an end in a palace coup by the
army in April 2019.
“We started realising how much our society needs our dreams,” said director
Amjad Abou Alala.
His 2019 film “You Will Die at Twenty” was both Sudan’s first Oscar entry
and the first Sudanese film broadcast on Netflix, winning prizes at
international film festivals including Italy’s Venice and Egypt’s El Gouna.
The film tells the story of a young man a mystic predicts will die at age
20.
As Sudan undergoes a precarious political transition, the country’s
filmmakers have found more space to operate, Alala said.
Young filmmakers act “without the complexes, the lack of self-confidence or
the frustration that we suffered in previous generations”, he added.
– Art ‘aborted’ under Bashir –
Talal Afifi, director of the Khartoum-based Sudan Film Factory programme,
has trained hundreds of young people in filmmaking.
Bashir’s government “aborted all cultural and artistic initiatives and
fought… diversity and freedom of opinion, through policies of alleged
Islamisation and Arabisation”, he said.
Afifi began work long before the 2019 revolution, with advances in digital
camera technology making filmmaking far more accessible.
The filmmaker attended a 2008 short film festival in Munich, where the
winning film — an Iraqi documentary shot on a handy-cam — inspired him to
return home and set up a training centre and production house.
In the past decades, the Film Factory has organised some 30 screenwriting,
directing and editing workshops — and produced more than 60 short films,
honoured in international festivals from Brazil to Japan.
Afifi says the roots of Sudan’s innovative cinema was born from the “hard
work dating from before” Bashir’s overthrow, when many cinemas were closed.
Today, cinemas are allowed — big budget Hollywood films, as well as Indian
and Egyptian movies are popular — but moves to reopen them have been
frustrated by restrictions to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus.
The Sudanese National Museum organised screenings of films, including “You
Will Die at Twenty”, but they were not screened in large theatres.
Filmmakers still face challenges. Hajooj Kuka, director of the acclaimed
2014 “Beats of the Antonov” was jailed for two months last year for causing a
“public nuisance” — for what he said was an acting workshop.
Other Sudanese films have also garnered international attention, including
the 2019 documentary “Talking About Trees” by Suhaib Gasmelbari, which tells
the story of four elderly Sudanese filmmakers with a passion for movies.
The quartet and their “Sudanese Film Club” work to reopen an open-air
cinema in Omdurman, the city across the Nile from the capital Khartoum.
It won prizes ranging from the Berlin International Film Festival to awards
from Istanbul, Athens and Mumbai.
– ‘Leap into the void’ –
Another film, director Marwa Zein’s award-winning 2019 documentary
“Khartoum Offside”, tackles sexism in the conservative country through the
story of young female footballers determined to play professionally.
Sudan films from 2020 include “The Art of Sin”, a documentary about openly
gay Sudanese artist Ahmed Umar.
A refugee in Norway, he returns to Sudan to see his mother again despite
the risks that remain even after Bashir’s ouster.
Many leading Sudanese directors have lived abroad for years, some shuttling
between the Egyptian capital Cairo and Khartoum, like Zein and Gasmelbari.
“We are children of the diaspora, which is why our analysis of the affairs
of the Sudanese is critical,” said Dubai-based Alala.
But if international recognition is seen as a sign of success, Alala fears
the new boom in Sudanese cinema will amount to a “leap into the void” because
it has not benefited from “any official support or suitable infrastructure”.
He understands that this is in part due to the many challenges facing
Sudan, as it struggles with a dire economic crisis and seeks to implement a
recent peace deal with rebels to end decades of civil war.
While Alala says government support is necessary for the film industry to
flourish, he admits that it “would be unfair to ask the new government to
shoulder this burden when the economy is devastated”.