This vital time capsule of events sometimes livestreamed or captured on phones taps the emotional and revolutionary fervour of the uprising against Omar al-Bashir, who had ruled Sudan as president for 30 years, in 2018-19.
The film opens in uncertain Khartoum four years later. Gunfire on emptied streets signals the country’s complex civil war, a conflict that receives scandalously little coverage in the West, despite the displacement of millions. More than 14,000 people have died, including 522,000 children lost to malnutrition.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. Hind Meddeb, the director of this documentary, filmed the jubilation in Khartoum as young activists took to the streets in 2019, demanding an end to dictatorship and envisioning a democratic, pluralist Sudan. The mood of protesters – many of them women – is buoyant.
The Franco-Tunisian-Moroccan film-maker, who chronicled immigrant life in Paris Stalingrad, is an outsider who, as one of her subjects notes, speaks lovely Arabic. She also sees potential for the Sudanese uprising to coalesce into her late father’s dream for an Arab world shaken by a feminist revolution.
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“I saw my country’s future in you,” she says as she trains her camera on the crowds calling for a citizens’ government. People sing, drum and paint murals. A young woman calls out the theocracy and the military in a graphic musical denouncement: “God curse fake preachers dressed up as clerics”, she raps; “a corpse has surfaced; after two days it floats on the Nile, a first-year student, throat slit, eye gouged out.”
Apart from brief glimpses of a militia stampede, the retaliation unfolds offscreen. Many of the comrades at the jubilant sit-in protest were burned alive in an action that killed more 100 peaceful demonstrators.
The violence, followed by the rise of the military junta, dashed hopes for a smooth transition to civilian rule. Sudan, Remember Us gives voice to the ordinary revolutionaries it portrays. As a coda outlines, several of those depicted have fled to Egypt and elsewhere, but the art created to sustain the revolution remains. As one activist hopefully insists, “Poetry is eternal.”
In cinemas from Friday, July 11th
