In spring 2019, filmmaker Hind Meddeb captures a jubilant moment of defiance among young Sudanese activists in Khartoum after the overthrow of a long dictatorship, and then chronicles the military crackdown that followed.
In April 2019, the Paris-based filmmaker Hind Meddeb travelled to Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, at a jubilant moment in the country’s history. The long-time dictator Omar Al-Bashir had recently been overthrown after a 30-year regime marked by genocidal violence in Darfur. Meddeb began filming with young activists rallying for a citizen’s government by staging sit-ins, making music, reciting poetry, and painting murals. Their hopes are expressed in signs that read “Sudan free from tribalism” and “religious pluralism.”
For Meddeb, who has family roots in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria, the movement brings to mind the aspirations of her late father: “the dream of an Arab country with its customs shaken up by a feminist revolution.” She captures demonstrations going late into the night with a celebratory atmosphere. The activists are defiant against backlash. “Bullets don’t kill,” says one young man. “What kills is people’s silence.”
Sudan, remember us enshrines this moment, but also documents the descent into war that followed. Today, Sudan is engulfed in violence between internal factions in collusion with external arms suppliers driven to gain control over the country’s wealth of minerals. The war has displaced more than 8 million people and killed over 14,000, but is largely ignored by international news.
No single film can explain a nation’s complex history or politics. Instead, Meddeb simply bears witness to courageous people receiving scant coverage, just as she did in her portrait of a Darfur refugee in Paris Stalingrad (TIFF ’19). Meddeb is always attuned to the power of language. Dictators may come and go, but as one activist asserts, “poems are eternal.”
THOM POWERS
Screenings
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