Sudanese Cinema, 1964 Onwards: Public Programme Tracing Sudanese Cinema Histories in London This September

A landmark public film programme tracing Sudanese cinema histories will take place from 3–7 September 2026 at Curzon Soho and Curzon Bloomsbury in London, the UK.

Sudanese Cinema, 1964 Onwards brings together five screenings of rare, restored, and historically significant films that reveal cinema as a space of resistance, political imagination, cultural memory, and artistic experimentation. Moving from anti-colonial allegory to exile, socialist internationalism, and documentary witness, the programme offers London audiences a rare opportunity to encounter one of the most vital and under-seen histories of Arab and African cinema.

Beginning with Ibrahim Shaddad’s Hunting Party (Jagdpartie, 1964), the programme traces a lineage of Sudanese filmmakers who used cinema to confront racism, colonial afterlives, political repression, social transformation, and the struggle to imagine freedom. It includes works by Gadalla Gubara, Sara Gubara, Hussein Shariffe, Suliman Elnour, Eltayeb Mahdi, Ibrahim Shaddad, and Suhaib Gasmelbari.

Opening the programme is Les Misérables (2006), Gadalla Gubara’s final feature and a Sudanese adaptation of Victor Hugo’s classic novel. Widely known as the Father of Sudanese cinema, Gubara made the film at the age of 87 after losing his sight, co-directing with his daughter Sara Gubara, who served as his eyes on set. Shot on location in Khartoum, the film transforms Hugo’s story of poverty, corruption, justice, and sacrifice into a tender and deeply human Sudanese epic.

The programme continues with Art and Allegory, a selection of four short films that use experimentation as a form of political critique. A camel circles endlessly inside a sesame mill; two blind men and a donkey lose their way in the desert; a crossroads becomes a portrait of a country in motion; a healer’s tomb exposes the dangers of blind faith. Through sound, repetition, fable, symbolism, and visual abstraction, these films reveal a sophisticated Sudanese modernist cinema rooted in everyday realities and traditional forms of storytelling.

Hussein Shariffe: Artist in Exile presents three films by one of Sudan’s most distinctive modernist artists and filmmakers, including The Dislocation of Amber, for UK’s premiere of its new restoration. Moving between Suakin, London, and Egypt, the session traces Shariffe’s meditations on place, memory, estrangement, and political exile.

Turning Worlds brings together three films made between 1964 and 1979, capturing a formative era of decolonisation, socialist internationalism, and cultural exchange. Moving between Moscow, East Germany, South Yemen, and imagined ideas of Africa, Suliman Elnour and Ibrahim Shaddad explore education, anti-colonial solidarity, racism, and the promise of social transformation.

The programme closes with Talking About Trees (2019), Sudanese filmmaker Suhaib Gasmelbari’s acclaimed documentary following members of the Sudanese Film Group as they attempt to reopen an outdoor cinema in Omdurman after decades of censorship, dictatorship, exile, and distance. Bringing together several of the filmmakers whose work appears throughout the programme, the film offers a moving return to the lives behind the films, and to a dream of making cinema public again in Sudan.

Alongside the screenings, the programme will include commissioned texts, invited speakers, and public discussions that place these films in dialogue with Sudanese modernism, political history, exile, and contemporary cultural memory.