Photo © Dulac Distribution
Sudan, Remember Us
“Here in France, there’s not much talk about Sudan,” says the unseen narrator of Sudan, Remember Us. The compelling documentary by a French-based filmmaker of North African heritage, Hind Meddeb, captures the exhilaration of Sudan’s 2019 peaceful revolution and the shattered expectations that followed.
Sudan, Remember Us will be screened as part of the 10th Annual Milwaukee Muslim Film Festival. The festival’s opening night includes From Ground Zero, an anthology of 22 short films by 22 filmmakers surviving in Gaza under extreme conditions. The intended audience is everyone, Muslims “as well as the broader community who wants a fun way to learn about their Muslim neighbors or aspects of the Muslim experience,” says organizer Janan Najeeb. “A wonderful part of the experience is the opportunity to interact during the discussion after the film, people who may not always cross paths, are enjoying a film and talking with others.”
Sudan, Remember Us belongs to the emergent genre, documentaries at ground zero of geo-political catastrophes, by filmmakers embedded with the people they cover. Meddeb joins similarly immersive filmmakers from Ukraine and Armenia and like the latter nation, Sudan’s conflicts have been underreported by Western media and largely forgotten in America. Sudan was given several weeks of headlines a few years back but was soon shunted aside by Ukraine and domestic U.S. politics. Meddeb’s film becomes a plea for remembrance.
The documentary’s happiest stretches were recorded in 2019 during the immediate aftermath of the coup that toppled the country’s long-standing autocrat, Omar al-Bashir, indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity for his brutal repression in the country’s Darfur region. With Bashir gone, the streets of the capital, Khartoum, were thronged with celebratory crowds. Car horns honked, flags waved, women ululated and turned pot lids into clanging cymbals. From Meddeb’s perspective, it looked like a revolution by romantic young idealists who transformed Khartoum into a sprawling festival. Artists painted murals, rappers rapped and a song by a midcentury Sudanese composer, Ibrahim al-Kashif’s “Land of Goodness,” became their anthem with its ringing chorus: “I am Sudanese, I am African/Moving forward, head held high.” The revolution was suffused with poetry and respect for the best of their country’s culture.
And then came files of military trucks disgorging a legion of men in desert khaki, wielding clubs, firing assault rifles. They set an encampment of protestors on fire, burning the occupants alive. Armed with inconspicuous cellphone cameras, Meddeb shot jarring scenes of violence.
Despite the 2021 imposition of a “Transitional Military Council” fronted by civilian politicians, life returned to something like normal at first. Shops reopened, people returned to the streets, but the mood to resist was not extinguished. The subjects of Sudan, Remember Us spoke of finding themselves—and each other—in the tumult of a common struggle to achieve a “citizens’ government” free of racism and tribalism.
The future appeared to be up for negotiation, but the military cut the discussion short, dismissing civilians from the government and seizing complete control. The crackdown claimed many lives and the two branches of the Nile, converging in Khartoum, were filled with the dead. Life worsened dramatically in 2023 when civil war broke out between factions armed with tanks and planes, a conflict that continues and has displaced millions of Sudanese. Several of the young activists prominent in Meddeb’s documentary are in exile, living in Egypt, the UAE and India.
Sudan, Remember Us will be screened at 1 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 5 as part of the Milwaukee Muslim Film Festival. The festival runs from Thursday, Oct. 2 through Sunday, Oct. 5 at the Oriental Theatre. For tickets and more information on the festival, visit mmwconline.org/milwaukee-muslim-film-festival/films-showing.php.
