Cinema of Sudan

Cinema of Sudan refers to both the history and present of the making or screening of films in cinemas or film festivals, as well as to the persons involved in this form of audiovisual culture of the Sudan and its history from the late nineteenth century onwards. It began with cinematography during the British colonial presence in 1898[1] and developed along with advances in film technology during the twentieth century.

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Culture of Sudan

After independence in 1956, a first era of indigenous Sudanese documentary and feature film production was established, but financial constraints and discouragement by the Islamist government led to the decline of cinema from the 1990s onwards. Since the 2010s, several initiatives by Sudanese filmmakers both in Khartoum as well as in the Sudanese diaspora have shown an encouraging revival of filmmaking and public interest in film shows in Sudan.

Cinema in colonial Sudan

Sudan saw some of the earliest filmmaking to take place in the British colonies: John Benett-Stanford,[2] a soldier turned war correspondent, shot footage of British troops in 1898, just before the Battle of Omdurman.[1] This short and silent film was projected and sold in Britain under the title Alarming the Queen's Company of Grenadiers Guards at Omdurman.[3][4] In 1912, the British colonial authorities made a documentary film of King George V's visit to the country, and screened it in an open-air theatre.[5] During the early years of the 20th century, pioneering filmmakers travelled up the Nile from Cairo to Khartoum and beyond, shooting films for curious audiences at home, as in a documentary showing Lord Kitchener inspecting his troops in Khartoum.[3]

From the late 1920s, Greek immigrants, who had also been among the earliest photographers in Sudan, established cinemas for silent films in Khartoum.[5] Other businessmen later founded the Sudan Cinema Corporation, which opened more cinemas in other cities and distributed imported films.[6] The magazine El Fajr had weekly pages on science, literature and cinema.[7]

Cinema from independence up to the 2010s

When Sudan gained independence in 1956, the new authorities established the Sudan Film Unit to make short educational documentaries and newsreels,[8] which were shown both in the cinemas of the major cities as well as on mobile cinema trucks.[6]

The first feature-length film made in Sudan was Hopes and Dreams, directed in 1970 by Ibrahim Mallassy in black and white.[9] After that, very few feature films were made, mainly due to lack of funding. Hussein Shariffe, a Sudanese academically trained painter, poet and lecturer at the Faculty of Arts of Khartoum University, became known as a filmmaker from the 70s onwards.[10] In 1973, he was head of the film section in the Ministry of Culture and Information and directed his first film, The Throwing of Fire, a documentary about a ritual in honour of the sun of a tribe in the southern Blue Nile State. This new artistic experience prompted him to return to the United Kingdom to study film at the National Film and Television School. Until 1997, Shariffe made several documentaries, for example The Dislocation of Amber, a poetic documentary about the historic port of Suakin on the Red Sea, or Diary in Exile, an account of the life in exile of Sudanese in Egypt.[11] In appreciation of Shariffe's artistic output, the Sudan Independent Film Festival, founded in 2014, is held annually on the anniversary of Shariffe's death.[12]

The Sudanese filmmaker with the most widely ranging work of more than 100 documentaries and newsreels, Gadalla Gubara, also produced a few feature films, most notably the tribal love story Tajouj in 1979.[13] His daughter, Sara Gadalla Gubara, learned film making in Cairo as well as with her father, assisted him in his private film production company called Studio Gad and became the first female filmmaker in Sudan. Sara’s film The Lover of Light (2004) is both a metaphor of Gadalla Gubara and of his interest in bringing social issues to light through filmmaking.[14]

Alsafia Cinema in Khartoum-Bahri, 2013

In Khartoum and other cities, more than 70 cinemas showed mainly foreign Indian, Egyptian, American or Italian films, but also news and commercials.[15] Despite the growing number of people who could afford television sets, the popularity of "going to the movies" was considerable, as reflected by Cinema Cinema, a weekly film review show on the government-owned Sudan National Broadcasting Corporation televison channel that had started in 1962.[6]

After the military coup of 1989, Sudan's Islamist government, however, suppressed cinema, as well as much of public cultural life. As a consequence, the Sudanese Cinema Company was dissolved and many government-owned movie theatres were neglected or sold off. The old Colosseum Cinema, for example, became part of Khartoum's riot police headquarters.[6] Moving images from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s became extremely rare to be seen, and those in the National Archives were locked away. Up to the 2020s, there is no film archive accessible to the public, and even still images from these periods are scattered all over the country.[16] These political restrictions, along with the rise of satellite TV and the Internet, led people to rather watch films in their homes and deprived Sudanese artists of public recognition, funding for the production or distribution of films, and, most of all, freedom of artistic expression.

Enjoying wider margins of expression, some filmmakers of Sudanese origin and living abroad have made films about their country, like British-Sudanese filmmaker Taghreed Elsanhouri.[17] Her documentaries Our Beloved Sudan, All about Darfur, Orphanage of Mygoma or Mother Unknown explore both the complex society in Sudan as well as the film director's views[18] as a member of the important Sudanese diaspora community.[19]

Revival of cinema and movie production since the 2010s

Aided by the introduction of digital film equipment, workshops for a new generation of filmmakers and by international funding or festivals, the 2010s saw several successful initiatives to re-establish film activities in Sudan. In 2010, the Sudan Film Factory[20] was founded, and in 2014 the Sudan Independent Film Festival[21] started its annual editions of growing popularity.[6] In 2014, Sudanese filmmaker Hajooj Kuka, who lives both in Sudan and abroad, made an internationally acclaimed documentary film about the ongoing attacks of the Sudanese army on the people in the Nuba mountains. Kuka's film, called Beats of the Antonov, provides an artistic collage about war, music, and identity on Sudan's southern frontiers, and could not be shown in Sudan under the government of the time.[22] In 2015, parts of the film archive of Gadalla Gubara were digitised by a German-Sudanese film restoration project, and thus his documentaries about everyday life in Khartoum of the 1960s as well as the feature filmTajouj could be shown to new generations in Khartoum as well as abroad.[16]

In 2019, the documentary film Talking about Trees by Suhaib Gasmelbari[23] about the decline of cinema in Sudan won several awards at international festivals. The same year, the fictional story of You Will Die at 20 by Amjad Abu Alala[24] won the Lion of the Future Award at the Venice Days, an independent film festival section held in association with the prestigious Venice Film Festival.[25] A young female Sudanese filmmaker, having studied film in Cairo and Germany, is Marwa Zein. Her documentary Khartoum Offside[26] tells the story of the first female soccer team in Khartoum.[27] This film had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2019 and won awards at several international film festivals.[28]

See also

References
  1. Convents, Guido (2005). "Africa: British colonies". In Richard Abel (ed.). Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. Taylor & Francis. p. 12. ISBN 978-0-415-23440-5.
  2. "John Benett-Stanford". IMDb. Retrieved 28 November 2019.
  3. Abel, Richard (2005). Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. Taylor & Francis. p. 12. ISBN 978-0-415-23440-5.
  4. John Barnes (2015). The Beginnings Of The Cinema In England, 1894-1901. Volume 3: 1898. University of Exeter Press. p. 60. ISBN 978-0-85989-968-0.
  5. Sharkey, Heather J. (18 March 2003). Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. University of California Press. p. 58. ISBN 978-0-520-23559-5.
  6. Ismail Kushkush, Reviving Sudan's love of cinema, Al Jazeera, 1 March 2014
  7. Salih, Mahgoub Mohamed (1965). "The Sudanese Press". Sudan Notes and Records. 46: 1–7. ISSN 0375-2984. JSTOR 41716873.
  8. Hjort, Mette; Jørholt, Eva (1 March 2019). African Cinema and Human Rights. Indiana University Press. pp. 221–222. ISBN 978-0-253-03946-0.
  9. "Hopes and Dreams". sudancineast.com. Retrieved 21 November 2019.
  10. "Hussein Shariffe". Barjeel Art Foundation. Retrieved 29 May 2020.
  11. "Films By Hussein Shariffe". www.shariffe.org. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
  12. "Home | Sudan Independent Film Festival". siff-sd.com. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
  13. Tajouj, retrieved 22 November 2019
  14. Ellerson, Beti (7 December 2010). "AFRICAN WOMEN IN CINEMA BLOG: Sara Gubara: Her Father's Eyes". African Women in Cinema Blog. Retrieved 23 November 2019.
  15. "Sudan: 'Cinema will rise again'". www.aljazeera.com. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
  16. "Studio Gad: The Value of Visual Memory – World Policy". Archived from the original on 23 November 2019. Retrieved 23 November 2019.
  17. "Taghreed Elsanhouri". IMDb. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
  18. "AFRICAN WOMEN IN CINEMA BLOG". africanwomenincinema.blogspot.com. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
  19. "Sudan's heart-broken diaspora". Radio Dabanga. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
  20. "About Sudan Film Factory SFF". www.siff-sd.com. Retrieved 16 November 2019.
  21. "Home | Sudan Independent Film Festival". www.siff-sd.com. Retrieved 16 November 2019.
  22. Ukadike, N. Frank (2019). "Beats of the Antonov: A Counternarrative or Endurane and Survival". In Mette Hjort; Eva Jørholt (eds.). African Cinema and Human Rights. Indiana University Press. pp. 221–. ISBN 978-0-253-03946-0.
  23. "Suhaib Gasmelbari". IMDb. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
  24. "Amjad Abu Alala". IMDb. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
  25. Weissberg, Jay (4 September 2019). "Film Review: 'You Will Die at Twenty'". Variety. Retrieved 16 November 2019.
  26. idfa (1 October 2019), IDFA 2019 | Trailer | Khartoum Offside, retrieved 28 November 2019
  27. "Review: Khartoum Offside". Cineuropa - the best of European cinema. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
  28. "Marwa Zein". IMDb. Retrieved 22 November 2019.

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