Voices and Visions of Sudan

Friday 17 October, 7pm

Sudan Remember, Us + Nyerkuk

Two powerful Sudanese stories explore youth, resilience, and resistance. One captures the poetic spirit of a revolution against military rule; the other follows a boy’s fight for survival and redemption after war shatters his childhood.

Saturday 18 October, 7pm

Cinema in Sudan: Conversations with Gadalla Gubara + Dislocation of Amber

A tribute to Sudanese cinema through two visionary filmmakers: one explores Gadalla Gubara’s pioneering legacy via rare archives; the other, a poetic metaphor on beauty, loss, and identity by the acclaimed artist Hussein Shariffe.

About the programme:

Curated by Talal Afifi, Voices and Visions of Sudan, invites viewers to engage with Sudan as a living cultural landscape shaped by memory, struggle, and imagination. Through the lens of filmmakers - across generations and aesthetic modes - we encounter cinema as a form of social inquiry and cultural continuity.

These works collectively serve as cross-generational testimonies. They trace the shifting contours of identity, belonging, resistance, and artistic expression within and beyond Sudan’s borders. From the pioneering moves of Gadalla Gubara, who used cinema as a civic tool for public consciousness, to Hussein Shariffe’s Dislocation of Amber, where ruins and silence evoke the deep temporalities of dislocation and colonial residue, each film contributes to an archive of Sudanese experience that is emotional, political, and poetic.

Contemporary works like Sudan, Remember Us offer a rich landscape of post-revolutionary diaspora life, where music, protest, and memory interweave to form transnational imaginaries of home and future. Short fiction films like Nyerkuk engage with intimate, embodied experiences of grief, masculinity, displacement, and tenacity, revealing how structural violence is lived and narrated in everyday life.

What emerges across this programme is a cinematic history, parallel to a set of cultural practices through which Sudanese people have documented themselves, often in the absence or distortion of state archives. These films challenge erasure. They foreground oral memory, visual poetry, and intergenerational dialogue as central methods of cultural survival. Seen together, these works reveal what cinema and filmmaking have long functioned as in Sudan: to bear witness, to preserve and transmit knowledge, and to offer alternative visions of community and futurity.

This programme is made possible with the support of the BFI, awarding funds from the National Lottery.