Morocco’s Marrakech (AP) Shajane Suliman delivered coffee, mint tea, and sandwiches to protests in closed-off areas of Khartoum during the early stages of the 2019 revolution in Sudan. She concluded, however, that the movement need more than food as hope gave way to despair.
A public uproar had emerged against the long-serving military dictator of Sudan and his economic mismanagement. Hundreds were killed or injured by security forces quelling demonstrators during the months-long protests.
Suliman then put on a gas mask and went out into the streets with posters that read, “Souls cannot be killed, let alone ideas.”
Filmmaker Hind Meddeb was working on a documentary about the suffering of refugees in camps close to the French capital, Paris Stalingrad, on the other side of the world. She was urged by Sudanese refugees to visit Khartoum and document their fledgling revolution.
This is the beginning of Meddeb’s 75-minute documentary, Sudan, Remember Us, which is competing at the Marrakech Film Festival this week after having screened at the Venice and Toronto film festivals.
In 2023, conflict broke out between the military and a paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces, which sprang from Darfur’s infamous Janjaweed militia, in Sudan, a largely Arab nation on the edge of sub-Saharan Africa.
At least 24,000 people have been dead and millions have been displaced in a conflict that has mostly been overshadowed by the battles in the Middle East and Ukraine, but exact numbers are hard to come by.
Suliman, who became one of its main characters, sees the documentary’s goal as being similar to what she wrote on a poster five years prior: to inspire a dejected populace after a revolution failed to establish civilian authority.
Despite the carnage, she claimed that the revolution felt like a little bit of heaven, full of poetry, music, and hope for Sudan’s future.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Suliman claimed that everyone had lost hope or forgotten. Since the beginning of the revolution, things have changed for us. It was simple since we were together. We must now alter our desired course of action.
A sequence of voicemails to Meddeb from April 2023, the month that the civil war started, opens Sudan, Remember Us. Activists express how their country has become unrecognizable and how life has been devastated by what U.N. officials have referred to as a forgotten war.
It primarily transports viewers to 2019, when Omar al-Bashir was overthrown by the Sudanese military, opening the door for power sharing and a brief transitional administration headed by civilians and generals.
The film, which was primarily captured with a handheld camera in a nation that has occasionally blocked the internet, outlawed foreign news outlets, and detained its own journalists, is a work of journalism as well as a tale of hope for the future.
In contrast to compelling, streaming-friendly protest documentaries like Jehane Noujaim’s The Square (2013), Eugeny Afineevsky’s Winter on Fire (2015), or Kiwi Chow’s Revolution of Our Times (2021), Meddeb takes an observational approach and chooses to focus on poems for extended periods of time. She takes the necessary pictures for a revolution documentary, showing the mayhem and fear with the excitement and unity of protesters battling the police.
However, the film strives for a distinct narrative style.
In an interview, Meddeb, a former journalist for France 24, stated that she was drawn to documentaries because they allowed tales to develop in an unanticipated way.
The movie is incredibly impromptu. At the Marrakech Film Festival, she stated, “I was filming what inspired me and diving into what was happening.”
She discovered and was inspired by a nation known as a literary land and a revolution where women were key players.
The documentary depicts protests that are pulsating, with drums banging during marches and poetry being spoken during sit-ins. As young people talk about their aspirations for Sudan, Meddeb takes the audience from subterranean cafes to street fights captured on phone cameras to the Nile River.
Following a June 2019 tragedy in which security forces massacred over 100 people, one woman claims that the revolution was a time of great feelings and projects. It inspired you to participate. Anything that unites people, be it a poem or a painting.
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