Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
War feels like losing your mind, it is said in the sad and lyrical Sudan, Remember Us. By then, the year is 2023, and internal conflict is tormenting the country. But the documentary is really a time capsule of an earlier moment when another future seemed possible. At the centre of the film is the Sudanese revolution of spring 2019, in which economic anger bloomed into the overthrow of loathed president Omar al-Bashir.
Director Hind Meddeb focuses on a group of young pro-democracy activists. Khartoum protest rallies have the vivid, smiling energy of a nightly street party. Music is a companion and political engine. We hear the fierce social critique of a lone rapper, the uplift of an older generation’s reclaimed anthem, “I Am African, I Am Sudanese”.
If the spark for the revolt was the cost of living, other causes join the fray. Speakers demand an end to tribalism. In the face of repressive Islamism, many of the activists are young feminists. Imams are condemned as mere “merchants of religion”. And yet the mood is celebratory, filled with excitement for a Sudan rich in natural resources.
Meddeb, who is French-Tunisian-Moroccan, captures the firefly new dawn in a collage of interviews and vignettes. What the film doesn’t offer is a ready timeline of modern Sudan to map the wider, tragic context. The flipside is bearing witness to hope in close-up. This is what the promise of change looks like on the ground.
It makes the plunge back into the abyss more mournful still. After the June 2019 Khartoum massacre carried out by military forces, violence pits the film. The young activists we have come to know are now surveilled and haunted by grief — exiles in their own country. But one of Meddeb’s biggest achievements is that, after the end credits, what stays with you most is the memory of their optimism: clear-eyed and unkillable.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas from June 27
Read the full article here