Cinema 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 2019, a new generation of Sudanese filmmakers such as Hajooj Kuka, Amjad Abu Alala, Suhaib Gasmelbari, Marwa Zein and Suzannah Mirghani have attracted international attention.
[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.
[2][3] In 1912, the British colonial authorities made a documentary film of King George V and Queen Mary's visit to the country and screened it in open-air theatres in Khartoum and El Obeid.
[2] In 1921, the British silent war film The Four Feathers, whose story takes place during the Anglo-Egyptian campaign against the Mahdist State, was partly shot in Sudan.
[6] The same story has been turned into several later movies, of which The Four Feathers (1939), filmed on location in Technicolor by Zoltan Korda has been considered as the most "harrowingly beautiful of all desert spectaculars.
"[7] Starting in the late 1920s, Greek businessmen, who had also been among the earliest photographers in Sudan, established cinemas for silent films in Khartoum.
[9] In the 1940s, the colonial government employed mobile cinemas on vans and the Sudan Railways’ ‘Public Enlightenment’ Car, trying to influence local audience's perceptions of the Second World War.
Desert Victory (1943), a film about the Allies' North African campaign against German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps, and Partners in Victory, a documentary about the Sudan Defense Force in North Africa, were projected for crowds in provincial capitals all over Sudan.
[10] In her book "Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan" historian Heather J. Sharkey describes the influence of photographs and films through the British educational system:[11] Gordon College served as photography's first point of transfer to Sudanese (as opposed to European) audiences.
Because photographs and pictures enabled the boys and Old boys of Gordon College to see and hence to imagine the world, the British Empire, and the Sudan in new ways, visual culture was as important to the development of nationalism as the culture of words.It was precisely in the emerging visual art of documentary films that Gadalla Gubara, reputed to have been the first Sudanese cameraman, was trained for the Colonial Film Unit in Sudan.
[8] In the 1960s, more than 70 cinemas in Khartoum and other major cities showed mainly Indian, Egyptian, American or Italian films, but also news and commercials.
[16] In an article about the rise and decline of cinema in the city of Wad Madani, the popularity of "going to the movies" was explained in terms of its importance for public cultural life, providing a "fresh breath of freedom in light of the country's independence."
[17] The first feature-length film made in Sudan was Hopes and Dreams, directed in 1970 by Ibrahim Mallassy and shot in black and white, with Rashid Mahdi as director of photography.
Hussein Shariffe, a Sudanese painter, poet and lecturer at the Faculty of Arts of Khartoum University, became known as a filmmaker from the 70s onwards.
[22] The Sudanese filmmaker with the most widely ranging work of more than 100 documentaries and newsreels, Gadalla Gubara, also produced feature films, most notably the tribal love story Tajouj in 1979.
[28] The 40-minute feature film Iman: Faith at the crossroads, directed and written by filmmaker Mia Bittar, was produced in 2016 with the support of UNDP Sudan and presented the same year at the headquarters of the UN in New York.
Based on the filmmaker's dissertation at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London and spanning Sudanese social history from colonial times to the late 20th century, the film investigates "how the human body was used as a means of resistance against the state, patriarchy and colonial oppression.
