Amidst the chaos in the streets that unfolded in Sudan in 2019 when President Omar al-Bashir was overthrown by a military coup after three decades of dictatorial rule, Hind Meddeb is fond of saying she could hear the poetry in every corner. The filmmaker’s ear was attuned to such sounds when she was inspired to make her way to the country in the first place by an 18-year-old Sudanese refugee who she met outside her door in France that became the star of her previous film “Paris Stalingrad” (co-directed with Thim Naccache) as he could burst into song or at least spoken word while awaiting his fate in a foreign land. She found he was hardly an anomaly when she traveled to Khartoum herself and found that chants of protest often took the form of rap or had at least some iambic pentameter in them, a fitting response when history itself rhymed as the country endured various revolutions over the years.
“Sudan, Remember Us” is meant to make those voices carry even further as Meddeb finds the simple act of pointing a camera at various Sudanese citizens as they fight for their future expresses hope for a country that has been mired in a vicious cycle for far too long. Although Meddeb is an outsider, the filmmaker couldn’t help but tap into what she felt as she witnessed a similar revolution in her native Tunisia as part of the Arab Spring in 2011 and comes away with a look at the seeds of what would eventually erupt into civil war in 2023 when military force intended to quell public demonstrations only had a multiplying effect. The present moment might look grim, but as citizens take what power they have with their voice, Meddeb crafts an invigorating portrait of resistance that has reverberated at festivals around the world since last fall. Now making its way to U.S. theaters, the director spoke about how she herself resisted narratives both formally in the film and those generally accepted about Sudan when they so rarely receive international attention.
How did this come about?
I met Sudanese people sleeping in the streets of Paris, literally in the neighborhood where I used to live, and I made a movie of that where I was showing how the French state was really mistreating people arriving from countries in war. When we finished it, the revolution started in Sudan, so it was kind of a dream for my Sudanese friends in Paris and unfortunately, they couldn’t go back to their country because they almost died many times on the road to Europe and they were in the middle of doing their refugee papers. They had no idea if this revolution was going to work or not and they really literally pushed me to go. They said, “Now the dictator has fallen, we’ll give you numbers of friends. You have to bring us back images of our revolution.” So this film is a story of friendship because I would never have gone to Sudan if I haven’t met these incredible Sudanese people in Paris and I really liked to bring back images of this revolution to my friends.
How did it find its shape as a film?
The film was very, very complicated to do because nothing ever happened as I planned. For example, the first time I arrived in Sudan, I was thinking, “I’m going to be scouting, I’m going to meet people, I’m going to write, and think about if I could make a movie or not.” I was really relaxed, and then I arrived there it was very intense. People had stories to share and were coming to me, which is something that never happened to me before, after seeing me with the camera and saying, “We have something to tell you.” So I started to film right away. Then the massacre happened only two weeks after I arrived and after it happened, I knew I really had to make a movie and I started to really make plans. But every time I would come back to Sudan, something was happening that would not let us film or do the things the way we planned it. That’s why I always say this film is like a journey and I’m taking the audience with me, and the audience can see through my eyes what I experienced.
When I traveled to Sudan, I take a one-way ticket and then I didn’t know what’s going to happen. I was really surprised by the amount of violence and I was also very unconscious about the risks I took. It’s only after when I came back and when we were looking at the footage that I realized what I did, because when you’re inside it, you just act and take action. You don’t think too much. And the film is very organic in that way because we didn’t have time to think. I shared the dream of the Sudanese people because you need to believe in the dream to make a revolution. If you think everything is going to end with war and destruction, you don’t do it and this hope was what was keeping people alive and keeping me filming. I shared this dream because it’s also my dream for the countries of my parents — Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria — and it’s my dream for Africa, the whole Middle East, and for the world because the same year the Sudanese people were fighting for freedom, you had people in Algeria who did the Hirak, a huge movement for freedom. You had it in Lebanon. You had it in Baghdad, in Iraq. You had it in Chile and in Hong Kong. People were fighting the Chinese, trying to change the constitution, so 2019 was really a year of revolution all over the world.
Was it difficult to figure out how to keep audiences engaged without a traditional narrative? You stay in the present moment and largely elide any historical context.
It’s just a small window to the whole history of Sudan, not explaining the whole picture. But at the same time, there are the emotions I was going through — the friendship, the beauty of the people, the intimacy that is very precious, and when I started to edit, the producer really wanted me to give context. And many people who wrote reviews about the film have said, “There is a lack of context.” But when I started to write the voiceover in French, with all the context, the film rejected it. It changed the feeling when you are watching it, so with the editor, we decided to make a very minimal voiceover that would be not in French, but in Arabic, that would be the same way I was communicating with [the people I met in Sudan], with the voice messages. We made it as a love letter to Sudan — to my Sudanese friends, but the whole country in a way.
We abandoned the idea of explaining all the background because it would have been another movie – and that’s a movie that should be done too, explaining why there is war in Sudan with archives, because I always say the reason why people are not engaged about Sudan is because nobody is explaining why there is the war. So I’m going to take the opportunity of this interview with you to tell you the reason of the why the war is [happening] because Sudan is very, very, very rich. The Saudi people, especially Emirates, [will] burn a village and push people out of their land, then they take the land, and they [create] huge farms, and everything that is produced on the farms is sent to Emirates. The other thing is gold smuggling, uranium, and also oil, so the reason [behind] the war was to stop the Sudanese people reclaiming their country, a country that has been stolen for so many years. There was 100 years of British occupation. It’s the third revolution in Sudan that I’m filming. There were also the Egyptian people who tried to occupy Sudan and the Romans, so for 30,000 years of history, [dating back to] pharaohs and pyramids, it has always has been a country that people were trying to occupy. The war was to destroy the revolution, because when you destroy the revolution, you destroy the civil society, and you destroy the people who are claiming their rights, so then you can continue to steal in silence and nobody can talk loud.
With the editor, we tried to make something quite simple, which was like, we’re going to make the audience feel the way [I did] on this journey and when there were always historical events and terrible things happening that was harming us, we tried to keep it that way so that when people watch the film, they’re like a little mouse in my pocket. They can feel what I felt and meet the people the way I met them and have this intimacy, which is something that you usually don’t see in most of the documentaries because it’s more about taking a distance and explaining. I didn’t want to have this distance.
I was thinking maybe then if you have these feelings for the people who are in the film, from that moment you can start being interested in what’s happening in Sudan. After you watch the film, you go read a book or articles from the New York Times or The Guardian, all the people who covered the revolution, and you can buy a book about the history of Sudan. You can start to open your eyes and understand that the Sudanese people are not that far from us. They share the same dreams that we have and they can also inspire us. Because democracy is not something granted. We people who live in democracies should know that democracy can disappear from one day to another. It happened in Europe in the ’30s. It’s happening right now in the U.S. and as a citizen, you always have to keep fighting.
And the Sudanese people can also inspire us because they’re also showing us that language and poetry is the only thing that can keep us as human beings when you are threatened and you’re surrounded with war and death. It’s a movie about making you understand that as human beings, we share the same needs and that there are tools of resistance. Art can be a way of resisting.
What’s it like to have captured this experience on film?
It’s a life-changing experience. [The filming was] also very sad and very beautiful at the same time. It’s light and darkness because I met the most incredible people when I was in Sudan, but also I saw with my eyes the highest level of violence with the militias and it was really, really a strange feeling. You know when you watch superhero movies or a manga, and you say “Oh, wow, it’s a tale.” But in Sudan, it was really like that. You have the monster and the good [guys]. It was the first time of my life I was experiencing something like that and many times when I was just there, I had the feeling it was like in “Blood Diamond” or “Black Hawk Down,” these Hollywood movies about terrible things happening to Africa. But I also saw the beauty of the people. It’s the most beautiful people I met in my life, these Sudanese people.
“Sudan, Remember Us” opens on August 8th in New York at the DCTV Firehouse, Toronto at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema and Vancouver at the VIFF Centre and opens in Los Angeles on August 15th at the Monica Film Center, San Francisco at the Roxie, Columbus, Ohio at the Gateway Film Center and Seattle at the Beacon Cinema.