The Cairo Film Festival’s Cairo Film Connection co-production market spread the love at an award ceremony Sunday night, with 15 projects claiming 20 prizes in the Egyptian capital valued at some 225,000.
Among the standouts were Suzannah Mirghani’s “Cotton Queen” and “Lamp in the Dark,” from Sudanese filmmaker Mahdi El-Tayeb, which both took home awards from marketing and distribution outfit Mad Solutions for distribution in the Arab world with a 50,000 minimum guarantee.
Set in a cotton-farming village in Sudan, “Cotton Queen” — which won the ArteKino Award at the Cannes Film Festival’s L’Atelier this year — follows a teenage girl as she begins to question cultural expectations and the collapsing cotton industry, under threat from both insect and human pests. “Lamp in the Dark” turns on a generational clash in a Sudanese village after the arrival of a mobile cinema.
No film won more than two prizes, with Amjad Al Rasheed...
Among the standouts were Suzannah Mirghani’s “Cotton Queen” and “Lamp in the Dark,” from Sudanese filmmaker Mahdi El-Tayeb, which both took home awards from marketing and distribution outfit Mad Solutions for distribution in the Arab world with a 50,000 minimum guarantee.
Set in a cotton-farming village in Sudan, “Cotton Queen” — which won the ArteKino Award at the Cannes Film Festival’s L’Atelier this year — follows a teenage girl as she begins to question cultural expectations and the collapsing cotton industry, under threat from both insect and human pests. “Lamp in the Dark” turns on a generational clash in a Sudanese village after the arrival of a mobile cinema.
No film won more than two prizes, with Amjad Al Rasheed...
- 11/21/2022
- by Christopher Vourlias
- Variety Film + TV
Sudan’s first Oscar entry, about a boy destined to die young, is warmed by compassion and gorgeous, dreamy imagery
‘You will die at 20.” That’s the death sentence handed down to a newborn baby at the start of this gentle, affecting Sudanese drama, the feature debut of director Amjad Abu Alala (and was Sudan’s first ever Oscar entry). The scene has a kind of intense, dreamy realism. A couple bring their baby son to a Sufi naming ceremony in the desert, and while a sheikh performs the blessing, a dervish in a green jalabiya sways in a trance. The crowd chants numbers, one for every year of the baby’s life. “One … two … three …” At the count of 20, the dervish falls into a faint. The sheikh confirms everyone’s gasps: the baby will die at 20. “God’s command is inevitable.”
The film is a parable about the dangers...
‘You will die at 20.” That’s the death sentence handed down to a newborn baby at the start of this gentle, affecting Sudanese drama, the feature debut of director Amjad Abu Alala (and was Sudan’s first ever Oscar entry). The scene has a kind of intense, dreamy realism. A couple bring their baby son to a Sufi naming ceremony in the desert, and while a sheikh performs the blessing, a dervish in a green jalabiya sways in a trance. The crowd chants numbers, one for every year of the baby’s life. “One … two … three …” At the count of 20, the dervish falls into a faint. The sheikh confirms everyone’s gasps: the baby will die at 20. “God’s command is inevitable.”
The film is a parable about the dangers...
- 11/8/2021
- by Cath Clarke
- The Guardian - Film News
The visual assurance of “You Will Die at Twenty” is the most immediately notable element of Sudanese director Amjad Abu Alala’s accomplished feature debut. Beautifully composed and boasting the kind of sensitivity to light sources and color tonalities usually ascribed to top photographers, the film lovingly depicts the remote east-central region of Sudan as a quasi-magical place of sand, sky and the colors of the Nile. The story, about a young man raised to believe an unfortunate event at his birth has condemned him to die at 20, generally has an equally clear-cut quality, simple in the telling yet matched to the pictorial tenor. Some may find a clash between its fable-like guilelessness and other moments when the outside world’s cynicism breaks in, yet the film remains a touching, nonjudgmental depiction of people circumscribed by superstition. Festival play is assured.
This pocket of Sudan is both life-giving, situated between...
This pocket of Sudan is both life-giving, situated between...
- 9/4/2019
- by Jay Weissberg
- Variety Film + TV
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