The all-too-brief surge of Sudanese cinema in the 1970s and 1980s saw an active community of local filmmakers creating short films that reflected their generation’s aspirations and dilemmas.
In April 1989, the Sudanese Film Group (SFG) was established to unify the efforts of filmmakers, attempt to defy state censorship, and pool sources. The group used the momentum created by individual filmmakers who studied film abroad, and made films about Sudan that connected this massive African country with the rest of the world. The group aimed at artistic independence from government strictures, as well as unifying artists in Sudan and in the diaspora. The movement, however, was short-lived due to the rise of a military regime led by Islamist General Omar Al-Bashir that same year.
For its special edition, El Gouna Film Festival is screening eight Sudanese shorts by three filmmakers: Eltayeb Mahdi, Ibrahim Shaddad, and Suliman Elnour. Their films were restored and programmed by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in 2018, a year before Al-Bashir’s thirty-year tyranny ended through peaceful protests in 2019.
Without a proper film industry, movement champions Shaddad, Elnour and Mahdi carried out a courageous attempt to create new horizons for expression amid state sponsorship. The films addressed the dichotomy of the modern vs the antiquated/archaic, which is very visible in Sudanese cinema. The Sudanese Cinema Group has arguably resisted the enforced modernity imposed on Sudanese people either by authoritarian national regimes or international forces.
Ibrahim Shadad has the lion’s share in the collection with three films produced over a period of 20 years. Shadad studied cinema in East Germany (the GDR). The Hunting Party (1964) tells the fictional tale of a Black man running away from a lynch mob during the American Civil War, but the Wild West aesthetics take place in a German forest, with German-speaking characters who highlight the working class rejection of racism. His experimental film A Camel (1981) describes “modern” methods of farming and industrial production, all from the point-of-view of a camel in a primitive village. His third film The Rope (1985) shifts between history and drama, as he follows two men and their donkey across the desert during the extremely violent Turco-Egyptian conquest of Sudan (1820–1824).
Africa, the Jungle, Drums and Revolution (1977) is Suliman Elnour’s graduation film at Moscow’s famed VGIK film school. The film is inspired by Soviet filmmaking and editing. It intercuts what people in the Soviet Union thought of Africa and its socialist aspirations, and what the reality was, using archival footage of tribal dancing around a fire, mining workers, pro-democracy rallies, female factory workers, and anti-colonial freedom fighters. In It Still Rotates (1978), Elnour takes his camera to Yemen, the most socialist country in the Middle East at the time, documenting life in a school in the desert, a small socialist bubble where children and teachers are encouraged to debate and learn egalitarian values. Again we see the desert, not the massive Stalinist buildings in Moscow. The Soviet-inspired Eastern modernity is challenged by the communal coexistence already present in Africa (and the Middle East) but with no Marxist-Leninist rhetoric.
The Station (1989) by Eltayeb Mahdi takes place at a gas station in a remote eastern Sudanese village. It’s at the center of the movements of goods and people to urban cities, a sign of modernisation and the flow of business, imported motorbikes and trucks, European oil companies, and fast cars. Observing this movement are the residents of this simple village.
The selected films show Sudaneses filmmakers’ efforts to raise questions dealing with the past and present. The films clearly question ‘modernisation’ as a solution to the problems of indigenous society, whether coming from national authoritarian regimes, Western capitalism, or Eastern communism.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been torn apart by a bloody civil conflict between military factions, ending the short-lived period of free expression from 2019 to 2023 and its hope of political emancipation after the fall of dictator Omar Al-Bashir. The new generation of Sudanese filmmakers continues to carry and engage with this burden. In contemporary films such as Goodbye Juila (2023) and You Will Die at 20 (2021), there is a constant search for identity and in a continuously changing political and cultural spheres.
