Sudan cinema flickers back to life after Al Bashir ouster
Islamist rule of 30 years had seen theatres shuttered in the country
Talal Afifi has worked for years to revive Sudanese cinema which has languished through decades of authoritarian rule. With the fall of longtime autocrat Omar Al Bashir, he sees new hope.
Al Bashir’s Islamistbacked rule of 30 years had seen cinemas shuttered and United States sanctions prevent import of vital equipment in a country once known as a pioneer for filmmaking in Africa.
When Afifi attended a 2008 short film festival in Munich, the winning film — an Iraqi documentary shot on a handycam — inspired him to return home and set up a training centre and production house.
“I wanted to remind people that there is a place called Sudan, which was once renowned in the field of cinema, and that it still has its heart beating for this art,” he told AFP.
The Sudan Film Factory, based in a suburban Khartoum villa, has since trained more than 300 young men and women in various aspects of film-making.
Today, following Al Bashir’s ouster in April, 42-year-old Afifi and his colleagues are hoping filmmaking will get a fresh boost in the country.
Sudanese cinema dates back to the shooting of the first silent film in 1898, a few years after the invention of moving images, according to veteran director Ibrahim Shaddad.
By 1946, a fleet of mobile cinemas were travelling across the country showing films under the evening sky.
‘Nerve-wracking’
“There were no closed cinema halls at that time because of extreme heat and lack of air conditioners,” said Shaddad. Legendary filmmaker Jadallah Jubara, who recorded such key moments as Sudan’s 1956 independence, later made his mark across the continent.
By the 1980s, Sudan had more than 60 cinemas screening Hollywood, Bollywood and Arabic movies.
But Al Bashir’s seizing of power on the back of an Islamist-back coup in 1989 delivered the industry a powerful blow. “There were five or six different government agencies that had the power to monitor us. That was nerve-wracking,” said Afifi.
By 1996, Al Bashir’s conservative Islamist regime had shut down most of the country’s cinemas. On top of that, an American trade embargo made it difficult to import foreign films, update old software or acquire equipment.
Sulaiman Ebrahim, logistics manager with Sudan Film Factory and president of Sudanese Film Group — a club for veteran film-makers — said Al Bashir’s rule had seen the country’s cinematic bodies “paralysed” and sent many film-makers into exile.