Spotlight: Restored Films – Sudanese Avant-Garde Cinema

This programme gathers a selection of rare Sudanese short films made in the 1970s and 1980s, each one still charged with the power to confront the present and to evoke an aesthetic language that remains fully contemporary.

We wish to frame the programme as a space of disclosure: a way of revealing what endured at the margins, what lay buried in the detail, and what Sudanese cinema has preserved as traces resistant to erasure. From Suakin in The Dislocation of Amber to exile and inner fragmentation in Tigers Are Better Looking; from the harsh circularity of labour, estrangement, and the burdens of daily life in A Camel to the economies of transit and waiting in The Station; and on to images of life in places that once imagined liberation, while persisting in the slow work of historical change in It Still Rotates – the programme gradually takes shape as a sensory and political map of images that look at the world from its edges, and through its less visible fractures.

These films may be linked by a broadly political and militant frame, and by a marked class consciousness. Yet they are equally bound by a shared insistence on inventing a cinematic language that understands condensation as density, fragmentation as structure, and the everyday as a site of deep historical inscription. They resist grand narratives by attending instead to stone, body, movement, labour, passage, silence, and rhythm. In doing so, they make of short form a spacious terrain for aesthetic reflection and the production of counter-knowledge, where personal experience intersects with social structure, the local with the regional, and the poetic with the documentary.

In this sense, the programme proposes a reading of what has been left dormant in files and collections, approaching the outmoded as a contemporary practice: a return to foundational cinematic moments, far removed from nostalgia, reverence, or iconisation, in order to reactivate them within the questions of our own time. In their formal boldness and aesthetic singularity, these films return from the past not as relics, but as works that continue their lives in the present-shaping an alternative visual memory while keeping open the question of what cinema can preserve, and what it can, at the same time, remake and bring into being.

Post-screening, the programme opens onto a conversation about the conditions under which Sudanese film history is preserved, circulated, and re-encountered today. Focusing on archival exchange practices between international institutions and Sudanese community-based initiatives and associations, the panel considers the unequal structures, practical negotiations, and forms of custodianship that shape access to cinematic material. At a moment marked by dispersal, vulnerability, and renewed urgency, it asks what it means to work with Sudanese film heritage in the present, and how archival responsibility might be rethought across institutions, communities, and contexts.

In Cooperation with the Arsenal Filminstitut