Sudan: A New Projection

Retrospectives, Revolutions, and Restorations

This program is grounded in a dual reality: one that is both material and epistemological. Sudan is being systematically and brutally destroyed before our very eyes. At the same time, its images are constantly reproduced and disseminated within a global visual economy that continues to reduce its history and complexity to ready-made templates of “crisis,” “war,” and “humanitarian relief.”

Thus, the question we should pose is not so much “What is happening in Sudan?” but how is what is happening made visible and construed with meaning? Who has the authority over narratives, who is granted the position of witness? Who is urged to offer their pain as material for media consumption?

From this perspective, “Sudan: A New Projection—Retrospectives, Revolutions, and Restorations” proposes a reading of Sudanese cinema that goes beyond seeing it as representative of a devastated land. Instead, we propose viewing the works of Sudanese filmmakers as practices of knowledge, resistance, and restoration.

The films in this program—from their production to the generations of their filmmakers—re-examine the conditions that render an event visible and amenable to filming in the first place: the conditions of seeing, preservation, and the circulation of memory. Taken together, these films shift Sudan’s position from an “object” of observation to a “subject” in the global scene. Sudanese filmmakers and film subjects alike thus emerge as producers of meaning, actively shaping their relationship to the world, to the image, and to the archive.

In this program, place appears as a material structure that speaks—as a space of conflict, of class formation and relations of power, but also of imagination. It becomes a domain for testing the scope and limits of gender boundaries, of public presence, and of the body’s potentiality in societies structured by exclusion and discipline. In these films, peripheries emerge as sites for mapping power relations and inequalities, where the structural violence of the state, market logic, and individualism converge. We glimpse the routines of daily labor not simply as labor, but as part of an entire economy sustained by exploitation and the reproduction of inequality. In this sense, carrying bricks, pressing oil, or bearing the weight of the world itself becomes a form of physical labor that remains invisible until cinema renders it politically legible.

The films in this program confront us with a central question: how can we depict cities when the destruction of war renders their depiction impossible? Imagination comes to the fore here as a means of reconstructing fractured time, torn cities, and a memory that can no longer be accessed except through evocation, and at times through representation. In this sense, The New Projection marks one step within a broader constellation of attempts to preserve Sudan even as it faces an overwhelming onslaught that threatens to collapse, occupy, or erase it. This resonates across the contemporary works presented in the program, extending into an inquiry into how questions of land intersect with gender, agricultural economies, and the politics of the future. Here, the discourse of “development” reappears as an urge to reorganize property, labor, desire, and their possible futures.

When films are restored and recalled, a set of questions resurfaces: Who owns the archive? Who decides what remains? And what merits restoration, circulation, and visibility? We continue to pose these questions, reminded, in watching these films, that the history of the image in Sudan was never marginal or incomplete; rather, it was pushed to the margins through deliberate neglect, wars, a lack of institutions, and unequal access to the tools of preservation and circulation.

Against this backdrop, I would like to emphasize that this year’s Spotlight on Sudan does not advocate for a “national dossier” in a narrow, celebratory, or representational sense, but rather proposes a different ethics of programming. As much as it seeks to avoid viewing Sudan as a distant place, it also reflects on how images themselves are produced; how power takes shape within festivals, markets, and archives across time and place. This program, therefore, does not ask audiences to “get to know” Sudan. Rather, it invites us to reconsider the regimes of vision that organize the world at large: Who is subjected to the gaze? Who is granted credibility? Who owns the past, and who has the right to speak in the name of the present?
Sudanese cinema, in this sense, is not merely an offshoot of catastrophe, but an ongoing practice of knowledge, of bearing witness, and of remaking the world from within.
Talal Afifi

Talal Afifi is a Sudanese film producer and curator dedicated to the archiving and preservation of cinematic works. He is the founder and director of the Sudan Film Factory, a cultural and film training and production institution that was founded in Khartoum.

Afifi has been actively involved in the film industry since 2010, with a particular focus on Africa and the Arab-speaking world. In 2014, he established the Sudan Independent Film Festival (SIFF), a major platform that has connected Sudanese and African filmmakers with their peers across the globe.