Notwithstanding the civil war that’s been ongoing since 2023, the popular revolution in Sudan four years earlier that lifted its authoritarian military regime brought some belated liberalisation to the country. “Creative self-expression” and cinema could finally have a voice, and storytelling from the country is starting to break through internationally, best seen by the success of Mohamed Kordofani’s Cannes-selected drama Goodbye Julia [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Mohamed Kordofani
fiche film], which was then widely heralded at other festivals and upon its theatrical release. Suzannah Mirghani’s Cotton Queen is billed as the first fiction feature directed by a Sudanese woman, and should continue raising the stricken country’s international cinematic profile. It has premiered in competition in Venice’s International Film Critics’ Week.

Cotton Queen is undoubtedly a modest film, bearing few surprises or novelties for seasoned festival audiences or those well versed in post-colonial African cinema, yet it impresses as a taut character study encapsulating Sudan’s current condition and its deep-rooted heritage. We follow its lead character, the late-adolescent Nafisa (Mihad Murtada), who works picking cotton with a group of girls similar in age, and feel gradually absorbed by her plight, her growing sense of empowerment and her courage to pry open her limited personal horizons. Mirghani, who also wrote the script, makes Nafisa into an archetypal everywoman for her country, an easily empathic anchor to the story.

Nafisa also occupies the youngest point of the spectrum in her female-dominated community – which is a true matriarchy, in other words. Her formidable grandmother Al-Sit (the charismatic Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud, a non-professional, like the whole cast, but not seeming it) has run the village’s cotton plantation ever since Sudan won liberation from the British; whilst not suffering fools and showing a ruthless business acumen, she cares for her workers well, and takes appropriate pride in the precious material she harvests and all the further beautiful fabrics that will spring from it. The old stately home of the previous British trader still looms over the cotton field, its interior furnishings perfectly preserved and caked in dust – a gothic, atmospheric touch from Mirghani that puts us in mind of the US Civil War, and the unstable legacies created when colonial subjects are granted their rightful power. 

But as we will see, this pure way of life isn’t immune to the changes brought by rapacious agri-business, and a handsome stranger comes to town in the form of Nadir (Hassan Kassala), a thirtysomething entrepreneur hawking genetically modified “magi seeds”. Nadir is both a suspicious and an appetising marriage prospect for Nafisa, and also wants to add the village to his overall property portfolio – a threat to the autonomy that Al-Sit fought for now re-emerging in a new form. Nafisa casually experiments with writing poetry, and obviously bridles at the threat of female genital mutilation upon marriage that’s still prevalent in these communities despite its recent ban, and so she asserts all the non-conformism she’s able to.

With her carefully wrought colour scheme of segmented ochres, whites and crystal blues, corresponding to the earth, the cotton rows in the foreground and the sky beyond, Mirghani creates a tidy unity of character, environment and theme, propelling us forwards to a stark conclusion. There’s not a cotton thread out of place.

Cotton Queen is a production by Germany, France, Palestine, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Sudan, staged by Strange Bird, Maneki Films and Philistine Films. Further co-producers are ZDF/Das Kleine Fernsehspiel, Film Clinic, Mad Solutions, JIPPIE Film and the Red Sea Fund. World sales are handled jointly by Totem Films and StudioCanal.