At a concert in the Sudanese capital Khartoum, a woman is sitting in the audience who is covered. Mona usually only wears a loose headscarf when she goes out in public. But here she obviously doesn’t want to be recognized. She has a good reason for this. She used to be the singer of the band that is playing here. She still loves music, but she doesn’t want to have anything to do with it anymore. She has given up singing for the sake of her husband Akram. She lives with him in a good district of Khartoum.
Akram’s carpentry trade provides enough for both of them. Mona doesn’t have to work, and certainly not in an artistic capacity. She is supposed to do what a traditional role expects her to do: be there for her husband. At least she has freedom of movement. During the day she drives her car, and this ultimately leads to the drama described in Mohamed Kordofani’s film “Goodbye Julia”. Mona causes an accident and, in the excitement that this causes, makes another mistake. In the end, one man is dead. And her marriage to Akram is now marked by a guilt that the man is not even aware of.
The conflict lines of that time
The intimate and the general are intertwined in many ways in “Goodbye Julia”. Mohamed Kordofani sets the story in 2005. People are taking to the streets in Khartoum after John Garang, the leader of a South Sudanese independence movement, dies in a plane crash. Sudan has recently been in the news in Europe mainly because of the immeasurable suffering caused by the current civil war between the regular army and the militias of the warlord Hemeti.
Anyone who is a little more interested in the region or what was once the largest country in Africa in terms of area may have noticed that from 2018 to 2019 a broad popular movement sought a democratic awakening for the country, which had long been ruled by a dictator – one of the most moving liberation struggles in recent times, which ended in disaster. But with his film, which was made during the Sudanese revolution and its suppression, Mohamed Kordofani goes back to a point that is constitutive for the current situation in his country: the time when South Sudan declared its independence and also received international recognition for it.
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The lines of conflict from back then are almost diagrammatically inscribed in the story of “Goodbye Julia”. After the accident that Mona caused, she feels responsible for little Daniel and his mother Julia. She comes from the south, and for the Arab majority society in Khartoum she is part of a discriminated minority. And so Akram initially hardly takes notice when Mona tells him that Julia and Daniel will now live as servants in her household. He has no idea that his wife is looking to make amends.
Interplay of different forms of silence
Mohamed Kordofani could also have called his film “House of Secrets”. He stages a complex interplay of different forms of silence. Mona and Akram’s marriage is marked by a history that only gradually becomes clearer and which gives additional weight to the imbalance that already characterizes gender relations in Sudan. There is a medical explanation for the fact that the marriage has so far been childless, which in turn contradicts a religious one and is therefore not discussed. While Akram gradually becomes more suspicious and begins to insist more on his male authority, a familiarity develops between Mona and Julia – and Daniel increasingly takes on the role of an adopted child.
Films are how societies present their calling cards in world cinema. The whole system is designed to ensure that talented people from areas where there are no structures for film production are given a chance from time to time. During the rule of the Islamist despot Omar al-Bashir, Sudan had no cinema to speak of.
In 2019, Amjad Abu Alala’s film “You Will Die at 20” appeared at festivals, a surprise, not least because the village’s history revealed a very specific, regional Islam. At the same time, the director interspersed the tragic irony of a young life marked by a mystical prophecy of doom with references to the cinema of Italian neorealism. The cinema of poverty and improvisation, but also the emphasis on the fate of ordinary people, is still a point of reference for “outstanding” cinematography today. Since then, experts have been waiting for the next film from Amjad Abu Alala, who owed his appearance at the time to the increasing film-political commitment of the Gulf states. But now Mohamed Kordofani has made his debut.
He too takes up the challenge that a film from Sudan cannot simply tell any story. That would be a missed opportunity, because the chronicles of festivals and film releases also have historiographical dimensions. Sudan has been present in the world’s memory for a while now with these two films (in fact there are several others that have their place in more specialized forums). One could speak of a critical representativeness against which “You Will Die at 20” or “Goodbye Julia” are measured. This results in a tightrope walk for the directors, because if they attack the contemporary implications too directly, their film becomes a mere statement. Mohamed Kordofani, however, succeeds in absorbing all aspects of political semantics into the drama of his characters. Mona is clearly a representative, but first and foremost a complex individual.
The suppression of her artistic temperament, which is evident in the ostentatious concealment, breaks out the moment her relationship with Akram opens up socially, and also ethnically and religiously, since Julia belongs to the Christian minority. The music, which has a strong but partly forgotten tradition in Sudan, stands for an emancipation that is at the same time a rediscovery of repressed roots.
Eiman Yousif, who plays Mona, caught Kordofani’s attention through a video on social media. Today, when she promotes the film with concerts in Kenya or Egypt, she does so without a veil. With a voice that she continually rediscovers for an oppressed civil society.
