Remember the Sudanese protesters who thought their time had come
Daniel Nelson
Hind Meddeb’s documentary is called Sudan, Remember Us. And we should.
Because it is a film about joy and optimism, poetry and painting, democracy and direct action. Unfortunately, it is also about self-interest, intolerance and greed.
Meddeb flew to Sudan in 2019 to film a sit-in protest at Army headquarters in Khartoum and over the following four years recorded a group of protesters..
The opening shots have a quiet, dreamy, hopeful quality. The students have seen the end of a dictatorship and the overthrow of corrupt soldiers and imams (“I don’t call them men of religion. I call them merchants of religion”). Their camp is a sort of commune; they sleep, eat and talk together, excited by their voices and ideas, by their heady experience of participation, by discussions about rights and civil disobedience, about ending racism and tribalism, about “having a good life in a democracy”.
A large road sign says, “Sorry for the delay. Uprooting a regime.”
What an enthralling moment in time. A new future.
Suddenly, on the last night of Ramadan, in one of the most shocking mood-changing film sequences you’ll ever see, a hundred trucks appear and an army of uniformed men are corralling men and women, forcing them to move, beating them, setting light to tents and equipment, murdering.
The camera pans silently along a street of devastation, everything smashed and broken. It’s a massacre, with an unknown number of deaths, injuries, broken families and disappeared, for which no-one will be held to account.
Equally suddenly, the film shows life resuming and, heroically, some of the students and other participants of the sit-in continuing to protest, albeit on a small scale, rapping their dreams, painting pictures of the dead on walls.
Meddeb ignores historical or political information — you will have to do your own reading if you don’y know the background — and focuses on four activists, showing their resistance, until increased violence forces them to flee. They live on in their poetry and the hearts and memories of others. You cannot help but be inspired, but the bitter truth is that conflict roars on, with some 13 million people displaced and perhaps 150,000 dead. And, as the film reminds us with a final kick in the gut, the crisis is largely absent from international media.
Sudan, Remember Us will be showing on 28 June at the ICA in The Mall, as part of the Safar Film Festival, from 29 June at the Curzon Bloomsbury and on 30 June at Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA