Guest Culture Podcast Podcast
Berlinale: Suhaib Gasmelbari revives the flame of cinema in Sudan
A film by Suhaib Gasmelbari, a Sudanese director born in 1979, was selected at the Berlinale at the Berlin International Film Festival, which runs until Sunday. Talking About Trees talks about four friends united in a Sudanese film club. They decided to renovate an old movie theater in Khartoum. These retirees want to transmit their passion for the 7th art to a population that could not see movies in theaters, and does not have access to independent cinema. This documentary screened in the Panorama section shows their quest for a room and their passion, intact despite years of exile and ceaseless harassment in Sudan.
RFI: " Talking about trees " tells the story of a group of friends, four Sudanese filmmakers desperate to revive the film's flame in Sudan. How did you meet them?
Suhaib Gasmelbari: I first met their film. Above all, Ibrahim Shadad's films [ Hunting Party (1964), The Rope (1984), ed.] Completely upset me. And after, the first time I returned to Sudan, after nine years of exile, it was Suleiman Mohamed Ibrahim who introduced me to the group. The first thing they did was to invite me to a screening they were organizing in a village near Khartoum.
They do itinerant, itinerant screenings?
Here. They make traveling screenings and always manage to escape censorship or ask for permission. So they get organized with the villagers and make projections.
They show Charlie Chaplin movies, old movies?
They show everything, in fact. They also show educational movies from time to time, with always an interesting movie to not bore people. The first time I went with them, that's where the idea of making the movie was born. We arrived very late because the car broke down. They set up their fabric screen and suddenly, during the movie, there was a sandstorm. In fact, no one has moved. They tied behind the screen and the show continued like that, with the sand in front of the eyes ... The wind swelled the small screen of fabric and for me it was already a typical image of the reality.
Who are these four filmmakers?
There are Ibrahim Shadad, Suleiman Mohamed Ibrahim, Manar Al Hilo and Altayeb Mahdi. These four are the first to have studied cinema.
All abroad? There is one who was at VGIK Moscow.
Yes exactly. It was in the years 1960-70 and 80, in Moscow (Suleiman), East Germany (Ibrahim) and Egypt (Manar and Altayeb). This is really the generation that brought the hope of a real cinema of very idealistic authors and they are still very idealistic, despite everything. They made movies since the 1960s, because they are not the same age. Ibrahim Shadad, the most active, is 83 years old.
They were always a little off film, because they were always revolted. But it got worse with the coup in 1989, with the arrival of the regime of Omar al-Bashir with the National Islamic Front. Everything was interrupted. They were fired from their work. In the Ministry of Culture they had created a cinema section. They had created it themselves and they managed to make films with very little means, but real works of art. I consider that their films are perhaps the only artistic works of cinema [in Sudan]. All of their works, if we put them all together, it may be three hours.
So after the coup, they left sometime later, in the 1990s. They lived in exile. And what made them come back from exile - including Ibrahim Shadad - and they set up this kind of defense association for Sudanese cinema?
Why did they come back? I also ask myself the question. We do not have an answer, actually. It's the virus of hope. We do not know, but we came back because there was a moment of hope after the peace agreements with South Sudan. They came back after, in 2005.
You show their quest for a great cinema. Because the big cinemas in Khartoum are completely abandoned. They are looking for a place they are starting to renovate, in anticipation of being able to make a totally free public screening. Their idea, for those young people who have never known a public session of cinema, is it to give them a bit of the movie virus?
Exactly. And of course, they adopted this project of renovating, reopening the cinema ... It was really to contaminate others who have never been able to go to the movies. It's huge for their small group.
Because there is censorship, of course. Everyone is putting a drag on them in this country that is not a democracy. Omar al-Bashir was elected in 2015, with 94.5% of the vote.
Here. Throughout this work - and in film and film - every day we thought we would be arrested. I always had to hide that I was making a movie. In the end, it's a movie about the love of cinema too. Despite everything, despite the censorship and the police, we have been able to obtain something cinematographic, which has a contemplative side and also looks like an inner rhythm, to individual poetry. I preferred to show that.
► Read also the story of an abandoned movie theater in Afghanistan: "Kabullywood", a cinematographic kite from Afghanistan, rfi, 5/2/2019
► 69th Berlinale, Berlin International Film Festival, February 7-17.
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