As the Doha Film Festival opens its inaugural edition with a robust Spotlight on Sudanese cinema and music, the program arrives at a moment when the country’s films, like its people, are fighting to stay visible. In a year marked by ongoing war and mass displacement, DFF’s showcase feels both celebratory and, quietly, political. Nowhere is that more palpable than in “Cotton Queen,” the debut feature from Sudanese filmmaker Suzannah Mirghani, screening in the festival’s International Feature Film Competition.
“Cotton Queen” has already begun drawing critical attention, winning the Golden Alexander for best feature film at the Thessaloniki Intl. Film Festival earlier this month, a milestone for both the film and the growing visibility of Sudanese cinema.
Sudanese audiences abroad have encountered the film at festivals from Venice, where it world premiered in Critics’ Week, to Chicago, often arriving in small but passionate cohorts. “The first reaction is always: ‘We’re seeing Sudan on screen,’” Mirghani observes. “Especially among younger Sudanese, there’s relief at seeing familiar faces, landscapes, and dynamics.”
For Mirghani, who lives in Qatar and developed the project with longstanding support from the Doha Film Institute, the Doha Film Festival represents a rare instance of a major event positioning Sudanese work not as a sidebar but as a central feature of programming. “It’s meaningful that the festival itself is choosing to spotlight Sudanese culture,” she reflects. “In many parts of the world, Sudanese communities feel overlooked. Here, there’s a sense of being seen.”
“Cotton Queen” began as a script that hovered between short and feature, prompting Mirghani to first make the 2020 short “Al-Sit” as a proof of concept with DFI support. The film became a breakout, winning the Canal+/Cine+ Award at Clermont-Ferrand and laying the foundation for her debut feature.
What anchored both projects was an unlikely obsession: Sudanese cotton. Mirghani has spent nearly a decade excavating its history and symbolism. “Cotton is central to Sudan in every aspect,” she emphasizes. The crop is entwined with Sudan’s domestic rituals, communal heritage, and the country’s painful colonial past. Women of her grandmother’s generation spun raw cotton into thread — work that allowed them to earn, save, and maintain a quiet economic agency. “Even when others in the house had no income, the grandmother always had cash because she’s selling her thread,” Mirghani explains. “There’s history there, but also women’s empowerment.”
At the heart of the feature lies a jarring discovery Mirghani uncovered during her research: that genetically modified cotton seeds, first introduced in Sudan in 2012, had overtaken the majority of the country’s cotton crop by 2020. “It was a real shock to me to understand that this prize of Sudanese history, which is natural Sudanese fiber cotton, is no longer,” she recalls.
“Cotton Queen” builds a fiction around that reality, following teenage Nafisa (Mihad Murtada), who becomes the focal point of a power struggle over the genetically modified seeds that will determine the fate of her village. Mirghani threads a coming-of-age story with an ecological and economic critique without allowing the film to drift into lecture. “The film isn’t a lesson, even though there are lessons within it,” she argues. “You understand the stakes through Nafisa, through her grandmother, through the community.”
The film also draws on the historic Cotton Queen competitions of the 1930s, beauty contests for mill workers in northern England that were also held, with far less documentation, in Sudan. “It was a competition for the prettiest girl working in the mills to put a beautiful face on a terrible industry,” Mirghani explains. “I wanted to reclaim that competition and turn it on its head.”
Mirghani had initially planned to shoot entirely in Sudan with a mostly Sudanese cast and crew. But after war broke out in April 2023, those plans collapsed. Many collaborators fled to Egypt, and the production followed. “In Sudan, there was genuine momentum for a film industry,” she observes, citing the recent international reception of “Goodbye Julia” and “You Will Die at Twenty.” “The war disrupted everything: lives, livelihoods, cultural works.”
Relocating became a matter of solidarity as much as logistics. “We followed them,” Mirghani notes. “Egypt wasn’t home for them. But it was where they were.” The natural environment along the Nile provided continuity with cotton fields and riverbanks nearly indistinguishable from Sudan, yet the emotional terrain was radically different. Some cast members had arrived only weeks earlier, still processing what they had witnessed on the road out of Sudan. Many of the actors were young, non-professional, and displaced.
Yet filmmaking became a source of stability. “They wanted the film to bring them together,” she observes. “Sudan is deeply communal, and they found that on set.” The Sudanese village the production built in Egypt felt so lived-in that leaving at night became disorienting. “We’d step outside and remember, ‘Oh my God, we’re not in Sudan anymore,’” she recalls.
Built as a multinational co-production, the film was shepherded by producers Caroline Daube
and Didar Domehri with Strange Bird, Maneki Films, and Philistine Films, whose coordination proved essential as the project’s circumstances shifted. The wide co-production network also included ZDF/Das Kleine Fernsehspiel, ARTE, Film Clinic, MAD Solutions, JIPPIE Film, and the Red Sea Fund.
DFF’s Sudanese spotlight extends beyond cinema to its Sounds of Sudan music program, a connection that resonates with Mirghani, who treats music as a narrative voice. “Cotton Queen” opens with girls singing aghani albanat, “girls’ songs” performed in women-only spaces. “The lyrics are very cheeky,” she points out. “It’s where girls speak freely in a context that otherwise can be quite restrictive.” The score, composed by Tunisian-French musician Amine Bouhafa, weaves in Sudanese instrumentation like the oud and tambour, while Brooklyn-based Sudanese singer Alsarah appears through a modern rendition of a traditional song. “Sudanese people are very lyrical,” Mirghani adds. She even wrote Nafisa’s poems herself, crediting them in the film as their own artistic form.
Sudanese filmmaking remains rare, an absence Mirghani feels acutely. “There may be only 10 Sudanese fiction films ever made by Sudanese filmmakers,” she estimates. “We need quantity, quality, different perspectives.” That scarcity makes DFF’s spotlight feel especially meaningful. Many of the film’s Sudanese cast and crew, still scattered across Egypt, are being brought to Doha for the screening. “We’ll watch the film together, on screen, for the first time,” Mirghani reflects. “That’s a gift.”
As for what comes next, Mirghani’s hopes remain rooted in connection. “Right now, we don’t have a country. Right now, the country is destroyed. So to be connected through this film would be my greatest measure of success,” she reflects. With international sales already handled by Totem Films, she envisions the feature traveling as widely as possible, especially to Sudanese communities in the diaspora and in refugee contexts. A global platform could help extend its reach, but for her, the true purpose remains the same: creating a point of connection for Sudanese audiences wherever they may be around the world.
variety.com
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