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For generations of Sudanese women, cotton meant money of their own. Grandmothers spun raw fibres into thread and sold it, granting women who might otherwise have no income a degree of independence. It was also one of Sudan’s great colonial commodities, grown for wealth that largely travelled elsewhere. In Suzannah Mirghani’s Cotton Queen, those fibres come carrying an awful lot of baggage.
Teenage Nafisa (Mihad Murtada) has rather more immediate concerns. She loves Babiker (Talaat Farid) and would like to marry him. Unfortunately her formidable grandmother Al-Sit (Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud) has already selected Nadir (Hassan Kassala), a young Sudanese man raised in Britain. Nadir arrives in the village with another proposal: genetically modified cotton seeds that promise bigger yields and threaten to supplant the crop growing in the surrounding fields.
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It would be easy to make Al-Sit the dusty totem to tradition, but she is far too interesting for that. The village matriarch is adored, obeyed and burdened with a past that has swollen into mythology. Her authority also sits in uneasy contrast with the economic independence cotton once afforded women like her. Meanwhile, the supposedly modern alternative comes with its own strings attached – GM cotton was introduced to Sudan in 2012; by 2020 it had overtaken most of one of the country’s staple crops, escaping the control of the matriarchy.
Mirghani fills this tussle with pleasures far removed from policy. The writer-director has been circling this material for years, first exploring Nafisa’s world in her award-winning 2020 short Al-Sit, which became a proof of concept for this feature. A Sudanese-Russian filmmaker raised in Khartoum and now based in Qatar, she approaches Sudan with the intimacy of home and the perspective of distance. The title reaches back to the Cotton Queen beauty contests, a British publicity wheeze exported to colonial Sudan in which pretty young women became the smiling faces of the cotton industry. Mirghani reclaims the crown for a Sudanese girl considerably less interested in being decorative.
There is, however, a terrible ghost hovering outside the frame. Mirghani intended to shoot in Sudan before war forced production to Egypt, where displaced Sudanese cast and crew rebuilt a version of home beside the Nile. Watching as a Sudanese woman in 2026, the familiarity is devastating. Homes like these have been emptied, communities scattered and lives destroyed. What should be the incidental pleasure of recognising a landscape, a song or the particular dynamics of a Sudanese family can suddenly feel like being winded.
Yet one of Cotton Queen’s great gifts is that Sudan is not presented as a country waiting to fully commit to tragedy. People flirt, gossip, scheme and become furious with their interfering relatives. Nafisa has the glorious teenage conviction of terminal uniqueness, that nobody in history has ever been as inconvenienced as she. In the mess of living life, she is given the freedom by Mirghani to imagine a future when so many Sudanese people are currently fighting to once again have.
