Courtisane festival: Rigid Time (II)
Jamal (Camel) © Ibrahim Shaddad
As part of Courtisane festival, we dedicate two programs to the work of the Sudanese Film Group, in dialogue with contemporary filmmakers and artists.
The core of Rigid Time is built upon the fertile period of Sudanese cinema spanning from mid seventies to late eighties, with works by Hussein Shariffe, Eltayeb Mahdi and Ibrahim Shaddad. This period culminated in founding the Sudan Film Group (SFG) in April, 1989. SFG would prove to be short lived as only two months after its foundation, a military coup led by Omar al-Bashir in June, 1989, ushered in a fundamentalist Islamist regime that stifled Sudanese culture, symbolised by the closure of its cinemas, and ignited decades of civil war, genocide, and systemic repression.
The tremors of that era continue to destabilise the nation today. The current conflict, which erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), is the violent culmination of those longstanding tensions, once again leaving the Sudanese people trapped in the devastating wake of a crisis decades in the making.
The title Rigid Time draws inspiration from the metaphysical studies of the Arab scholar Ibn Arabi, exploring the paradoxical concept of time as a fluid dimension and space as time frozen in place. The films of Shariffe, Mahdi and Shaddad are put in dialogue with contemporary filmmakers and artists, showcasing a cinematic language forged in the face of political disillusionment, one that finds movement even when history seeks to stand still.
→ Curated by Rund Alarabi & Vincent Stroep
→ In the presence of Leena Habiballah
→ Part of Courtisane festival (1−5 April), in collaboration with Kunsthal Gent in the context of the Friday Evenings
Shehab Satti
Nosophobia
Anxiety and existential doubt dominate the mind of an isolated young man as he tries to emerge from seclusion, projecting these inner conflicts onto his Sudanese passport.
Nosophobia © Shehab Satti
Ibrahim Shaddad
Camel
Jamal follows the life of a camel, most of which plays out in a dreary, small room — a sesame mill. Bound and blindfolded, the camel is condemned to turn in endless circles inside the mill, its sense of time distorted. Shaddad creates a powerful meditation on labor, exploitation, and economic progress and uses the camel’s plight as a metaphor for the struggles of workers enduring harsh conditions and treatment. With its haunting sound design and minimalist approach, Jamal stands as one of Shaddad’s most affecting works, exploring themes of exploitation that run throughout his filmography.
Jamal (Camel) © Ibrahim Shaddad
Leena Habiballah
Dead as a Dodo
Dead As A Dodo lays bare the settler colonial mythology at the heart of the popular narrative of the Dodo’s extinction. By drawing on archival material and the Dodo’s apparition, the film performs a sensory haunting, reviving the spaces between life and death that have been shaped by settler violence into a value-forming exercise. This work is inspired by and is in conversation with a book of poems titled A Theory of Birds by the Palestinian-American poet Zaina Alsous.
Dead As A Dodo © Leena Habiballah
Timeea Mohamed Ahmed
Is it war?
When Jafar is detached from his soul in a surreal journey through a forest, he must mentally escape the brutal truths of the conflict in his homeland Sudan and the horrors of war and displacement, before it destroys his mind. Playful images about harsh reality.
Is it war? © Timeea Mohamed Ahmed
Hussein Shariffe
The Dislocation of Amber
The Dislocation of Amber was filmed in the city of Suakin, a formerly flourishing port in Sudan, now in ruins. Its history is one of famine and opulence, devastation and progress, rich trade and damage, and colonialism. Shariffe used symbols to accentuate a sense of desertion and alienation hinted at in the title. This surreal masterpiece of Sudanese cinema features poems sung by the late Sudanese singer Abdel-Aziz Dawoud.
The Dislocation of Amber © Hussein Shariffe