Suzannah Mirghani's first feature, Cotton Queen, makes her the first Sudanese woman to direct a feature film, The Guardian writes in its review. The paper singles out a powerful turn by Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud as Al-Sit, the elder woman of a village.
According to The Guardian, the director had to abandon her original plan to shoot in Sudan when war broke out in 2023, and moved the production to Egypt. The review describes a film that speaks to the long shadow cast by the British empire, to neocolonialism, to women's rights and to female genital mutilation, while holding on to its atmosphere of mystery and its touches of magic realism.
"I decide my past," a village matriarch declares in the film, as quoted by The Guardian.
The Guardian places the story in present-day Sudan, where Al-Sit is portrayed as an iron-willed woman whom others are wise not to cross. Villagers know the tale of how, as a young girl, she drove the British out of the town, and children there happily repeat the story of how she killed every one of them, the review says.
