Director: Suzannah Mirghani

Starring: Mihad Murtada, Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud, Talaat Fareed, Haram Bisheer, Hassan Kassala

Adapted from her short film ‘Al-Sit’, Sudanese Russian director Mirghani’s coming-of-age drama is an impressive feature debut. Nafisa (Murtada) is a teenager living in a small Sudanese cotton farming village. She lives with her grandmother Al-Sit (Mahmoud), the village matriarch revered by her granddaughter and fellow villagers for her anti-colonial resistance. Al-Sit is even rumoured to have killed a British soldier. When not hanging around and gossiping with her friends, Nafisa is a budding  poet, trying to woo the sweet local onion farmer boy Babiker (Fareed) who seems unaware of her affections. When a young flashy businessman Nadir (Kassala) arrives in the village hawking genetically modified seeds that do not reproduce and need replacing every year, which would leave farmers in hock to the suppliers, many of the local women see him as a prize catch. Not so Nafisa, despite the determination of her mother Aisha (Bisheer) to make a good match for her daughter. Murtada delivers a luminous and nuanced performance as Nafisa, weighing up the good of the village with her own hopes for self-determination. Filming in Egypt, due to the conflict in Sudan, director Mirghani nevertheless presents a fascinating vision of smalltown Sudanese life, caught between tradition (some good, some bad), and relentless modernity.

David Willoughby

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