the torn history of Sudan told in a magnificent first film with accents of Greek tragedy

Goodbye Julia by Mohamed Kordofani, the first Sudanese film presented in the official selection at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, won the Freedom Prize in the Un Certain Regard section. A few weeks earlier, Sudan had plunged back into war. This film in the form of a Greek tragedy returns to one of the episodes in the torn history of this country, through the story of a strange friendship between a rich Sudanese Muslim northerner, and a young Christian southerner in the 2000s. The film is released in theaters November 8.

July 30, 2005. Southern Christian leader John Garang dies in a helicopter crash. The news breaks on television in Mona’s opulent living room (Eiman Yousif) and her husband Akran (Nazar Goma), a bourgeois couple from Khartoum.

This event calls into question a peace plan signed a few months earlier between the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the southern rebels), and the government in Khartoum. An agreement supposed to put an end to more than twenty years of civil war between the North, predominantly Muslim, and the South, populated mainly by Catholics. A self-determination referendum is due to take place a few months later.

Beneath Mona and Akram’s windows, violence is unleashed. In another neighborhood, Julia (Siran Riak), her husband and their little boy Daniel must leave their home, expelled because they are Christians. After Julia’s husband mysteriously disappears and civil war threatens again, Mona hires the young woman as a servant and invites her and her little boy to move into her house. The two women become closer and become friends and Daniel is welcomed like a son by this childless couple, Mona taking responsibility for paying for his education, Akram sharing moments of complicity with him in his workshop.

Greek tragedy

War, murder, lies, betrayal, love and revenge, all the ingredients of tragedy are there in this first feature film from Mohamed Kordofani who, through the friendship between two women who were never destined to meet, immerses us in the history of a country torn apart by civil war.

Why does Mona show such generosity towards Julia? What secrets are the two women hiding from each other and what will happen when the masks fall? Can we “become family” with those who have always been designated as enemies? All these questions run through the film Mohamed Kordofani, who says “driven by a feeling of guilt and a deep desire for reconciliation”. Coming from the Muslim community of Khartoum, this aeronautical engineer moved to the cinema to try to establish himself “get rid of this inherited racism”.

And it is with delicacy and nuance that he advances the pawns of this story charged with a political ambition full of hope. The director tells the drama of a country on the scale of these two women, whom he places at the center of his film. In this way, it highlights the lie, which reigns in a society locked by its fractures, offering no other way out than duplicity to its members to survive.

“They are animals”whistles Akram to designate the southerners, also using the word“slave” to qualify Julia’s function in his house, and more broadly to express the little consideration he gives to “his enemies”, the members of the Christian community of the South. In this apartheid society, marked by racism and hatred of others, Mona and Julia, each in their own way, refuse diktats. Mona finds tricks to escape the constant surveillance of her husband, who has forbidden her to sing under penalty of kicking her out of the home. Julia, a free and courageous young woman, breaks boundaries by refusing the places assigned, as much by the opposing camp as by her own camp, and as much for herself as for Mona.

“Reconciliation”

The story that Mohamed Kordofani tells us is brought to life by a duo of exceptional actresses. Hymn to peace and reconciliation, Goodbye Julia is served by precise staging, deployed at the right pace, which lets the action live, the silences, the settings sometimes, which say a lot, often in fixed shots, sometimes camera movements, always very slow.

Like Greek tragedy, Goodbye Julia offers reading keys to understand the complexity of the feelings at stake, the issues and the impasses of a situation of internal war which corrupts its citizens, whatever their side, all victims of an infernal spiral. The film offers an open outcome with a hope of reconciliation, but the very last image also suggests the worst, eternally ready to resurface at the slightest opportunity.

It’s necessary “open the wound, in order to clean it and then treat it”says Mohamed Kordofani, “People need to talk”adds the director, who counts on art and cinema to “touch consciences”. The director confides that he left his job and invested everything he had to undertake this film and defend Sudanese cinema, banned for thirty years in his country. “We have lots of stories to tell about this often neglected part of the world”he confided to Franceinfo Culture just before climbing the steps in Cannes.

The sheet

Gender : drama
Director: Mohamed Kordofani
Actors: Siran Riak, Ger Duany, Eiman Yousif
Country : Sudan, Sweden
Duration : 2h 00min
Exit : November 8, 2023
Distributer : ARP Selection
Synopsis : A strange friendship links a rich Muslim Sudanese woman from the North to a Christian Sudanese woman from the South who is destitute after the death of her husband. What is behind the concern of one towards the other?