Sudan Independent Cinema Festival Screens 81 Films
26 January, 2020
KHARTOUM (Sudanow) - The Sixth Edition Of the Sudan Independent Cinema Festival will draw to a close tomorrow (Monday) after screening 81 films in Khartoum’s different venues.
The Festival is organized annually by the Sudan Film Factory, an independent cultural platform aims to build the capacities of young Sudanese talents, produce films and expose Sudanese audiences to film making and cinema. It has produced more than 44 films, and has conducted more than 30 training workshops. Many of these films receive critical acclaim and as a result, a number of Sudanese films received invitations for screening and participation in major film festivals; such as the Rotterdam Film Festival (Netherlands), the International Alexandria Film Festival and the Luxor Film Festival (Egypt), and in festivals in Iraq, Germany, Korea and Argentina among others.
Festival Director Talal Afifi has announced, at the opening session of the week-long Festival, that the Festival was dedicated “ in gratitude to all the souls that have turned into stars, leading the way for Sudanese women and men on the path to an honorable and emancipated life...and to all the Sudanese artists who faced difficulties while practicing their art and documenting life in the most difficult and darkest moment of our nation's contemporary history, and for freedom fighters the world over.”
The Festival had opened in open air at the Khartoum Sunut Forest on the White Nile eastern bank here by the documentary film “Offside Khartoum”, produced by Sudanese film Director Marwa Zain.
The film had won a lot of international awards and acclaims. It tells the story of a group of Sudanese women with high passion for women football who came on collision course with the ruling Islamists who squeezed their activity.
Other films were put at display in nine other theatres that include the House of Heritage, the German Goethe Institute, the French Center and the International Conferences Center.
Chairman of the committee assigned to select the Festival’s films, Film Director Amjad Abulela, has said that the films displayed in the Festival included documentaries, short and long films from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Italy, France, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, Algeria, Argentina, South Africa, the United States of America and Australia.
The Festival had devoted an award, named the Black Elephant, for short Sudanese films in commemoration of the late Filmmaker and Plastic Painter Hussein Shareef (1934-2005)
In addition to the film shows, the Festival had organized workshops and lectures in which experts from Sudan and abroad had taken part.
Organizers had expressed hope the Festival would pump life blood in the Sudanese film industry that deteriorated during the defunct regime.
The Festival is organized on 21 January every year, in commemoration of the late filmmaker Hussein Shareef who passed away on the same day in 2005, after “devoting his whole life to filmmaking. Filmmaking was one of the late Shareef’s means to express social reality,” said the organizers.
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