This programme will screen on the evening of Wednesday 29 January at Hyde Park Picture House in a public screening open to Archive Screening Days delegates. It will also be made available to watch online.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, a vanguard group of Sudanese filmmakers founded a collective to steer their artistic endeavours, to give voice to the realities of living in Sudan riven by successive waves of political turmoil. Against this backdrop, the films manage to be reflective, experimental, amusing and speak to issues within Sudan and far beyond its borders. Before falling into abeyance following the 1989 coup and threats against cultural organisation, they produced a stunning collection of short films, some of them final film school projects produced in Soviet film schools that were then welcoming African filmmakers.
As Sudan continues to suffer the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, this is an urgent time to consider the brilliant cinema of the country. These four films from group members Ibrahim Shaddad, Suliman Elnour and Eltayeb Mahdi – some of whom featured as subjects in the charming and thoughtful documentary Talking About Trees (2019) – capture the crest of a wave of filmmaking that was never allowed to break.
This screening is in support of Hadhreen, a grassroots charity in Sudan offering community kitchens to Sudan’s displaced people, facing humanitarian crisis.
The digital restoration was realised within the framework of “Archive außer sich”, a project by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt as part of “The New Alphabet”, a HKW project supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media due to a ruling of the German Bundestag.
Films in the programme
Africa, The Jungle, Drums and the Revolution (Afrika, Džungli, Baraban I Revoljucija)
Dir: Suliman Elnour | 1977 | 11 mins
Suliman Elnour’s film examines representations of Africa in Soviet society. Children’s drawings that deal with Africa, interviews with inhabitants of Moscow, and archival material depicting Africa from Soviet archives broach the issue of those representations and the stereotypes connected to them.
A Camel (Jamal)
Dir: Imbrahim Shaddad | 1981 | 14 mins
A report from the life of a camel, most of which plays out in a dreary, small room: a sesame mill. Blindfolded, the camel runs in circles, driven to do so by it owner. For a short while it is allowed to relax in the courtyard – where it dreams a radical redress of the master-servant dynamic – before it reluctantly returns to its work in the dark room without any sunlight.
The Station (Al Mahatta)
Dir: Eltayeb Mahdi | 1989 | 16 mins
Sudan, in the late 1980s. People cross the desert on foot or cover long distances by car and truck. In The Station Eltayeb Mahdi shows encounters at one of the large crossroads between the capital Khartoum in the centre of the country and Bur Sudan in the Red Sea.
Hunting Party (Jagdpartie)
Dir: Imbrahim Shaddad | 1964 | 41 mins
Hunting Party is Ibrahim Shaddad’s graduation film. It uses the format of the Western, which he transposes into a German landscape – a forest in Brandenburg – for a transnational investigation of both the murderous violence of and everyday complicity in racism.
Part of Archive Screening Days 2025
Also screening:
Badnam Basti
Chameleon Street
In the Veins
Murdering Mr Devil