Hind Meddeb Interview Sheffield Docfest

Hind Meddeb’s Sudan, Remember Us (2024) centres the exceptional human power of art, music and revolution of the Sudanese youth who resist the brutal regime of Omar Al-Bashir. Beginning in Khartoum just after the fall of the dictator in 2019, Meddeb documents the protests filled by art and poetry as they demand democracy and human rights. However, victory is soon overturned as a military ruthlessly dissolves the activist frontline and civil war breaks tears through the country. While this film does not end with victory, it definitely does not end in defeat - as we witness a generation, who are empowered by each other and we see an Africa not clouded by a worldview of poverty and strife, but of unity and courage. 

TNBFC spoke with Meddeb about building true friendship with the Sudanese people, and how this film is not about explanation, but connection. 

TNBFC: Thank you so much Hind for speaking with me today and for making this film. You’re an incredible filmmaker and journalist… 

Hind Meddeb: I’m not a journalist anymore because I was too desperate, you know. I couldn't work independently. They were always rewriting my work and I had big fights with the people I worked with. I worked for the French public TV, French public radio, I worked for big channels, and a French German Channel, and I was always confronted with this. In the end I decided to go to the cinema because it was a different way of financing (what I do). When you do a documentary for TV, you always have someone above you that is going to explain to you how to tell the story. And sometimes they even rewrite your work and they have this ‘right’, which is horrible. So, for 10 years, I haven't worked as a journalist and all my work is done with cinema financing and cinema production companies. 

TNBFC: You've done so much over the 10 years but for Sudan, Remember Us specifically, where did it begin? 

HM: Every one of my movies is very personal. I never go somewhere to cover an event, I don't say, ‘I’ll go to Tunisia to cover the Tunisian revolution’, or ‘I’ll go to Syria to cover the liberation of Syria’. When I do a movie, it's always very grounded to a personal story. Sudan, Remember Us is the second part of the movie Paris Stalingrad, which was a movie I shot at the Metro Station Stalingrad in Paris, where in 2016, 4000 people were sleeping on the ground in the streets and being harassed by the police. At that time, I was living in this neighbourhood and I started to help people. I hosted some people in my place and I was helping them to make their papers because the roughest thing in France is that when you apply for asylum, you have to do it in French. There are a lot of translators who are fake translators and make money on the backs of the refugees. They don't translate the stories, they just give them a pre-written story, depending on the region you come from. So the first activist thing I did was to help people translate their stories. And then when I saw that the situation was not acknowledged in the media, and nobody was talking about what's happening in the heart of Paris – everybody was focused on the jungle in Calais, and nobody was talking about how the French police and industries of Paris were breaking the law and breaking asylum rights to these people. 

So this movie, Paris Stalingrad, is the portrait of a young 17 year old Sudanese man, arriving in Paris, and he was writing poems. The voice over of the movie is his poems and then I became friends with a lot of Sudanese people. I used to say I met Sudan in Paris, and when the revolution started in Sudan and when Omar Al Bashir fell from power, they all told me, ‘Hind you were filming us humiliated, sleeping on the streets, being beaten by the police every day, now you can go to our country, it's possible, and we will help you, and so you can see and understand where we come from’. And this is how Sudan, Remember Us started. 

I used to say that Sudan, Remember Us is first of all, a story of friendship. My friendship with the people I met in Sudan who are in the film, and who became friends of mine for life.

TNBFC: When you spoke about in your previous film that the poet narrated the whole film; I wanted to expand on how sound and art is completely central and encompasses Sudan, Remember Us from the very beginning. Sound is so intentionally used. Was it something that was planned i.e. how poetry and art would speak into the film? 

HM: To be honest, I'm never planning because I'm really a very spontaneous person, and most of my movies started because I met someone or something happened. Then I start to film, I come back and say we need to do a movie, so then I start to write the film. It always starts with the first trip, or first things that I start to film very spontaneously. But in the end for Sudan, Remember Us, unfortunately nothing was ever happening as I planned. I always had to deal with unexpected events and being separated, losing the people because, for example, after the massacre of the 3rd June, the phones were broken or even stolen or lost. I always kept in touch with Maha, but it took me months to find Shajane, and Muzamil, but eventually I found them. I always say that Sudan, Remember Us is a movie with walls because I couldn't shoot the movie as it was written. You plan to do something, and then the military could happen. You plan to do something, and then the massacre happens. You try to go back to Sudan, and then they don't give you the visa, then you find crazy ways to get this visa, then you're there, and then you get arrested; you never know. I didn't talk about all this in the film, because I was thinking we need to stay focused on the Sudanese people and there was no space for talking about me and how I made this movie. But it's interesting to talk about it now that we are doing this interview. 

TNBFC: You were focusing on the Sudanese people, but you focused a lot on their art, could you tell us a bit more about how you discovered this? 

HM: The music is everywhere; the people in Sudan, who you’re seeing in the film are not famous people. I didn't say, “Okay, I'm gonna go see this incredible singer, I'm gonna go interview this very famous poet.” No, it was there, everywhere. It was not planned and the film is really representing the random, ordinary, unknown people. The only person in the film who is famous is Shajane; she’s a poetic messenger and her messages go viral on the internet. When you walk in the streets of Khartoum with Shajane, she’s like a movie star, they really love her. 

TNBFC: It’s all random people, but their artists and poets, and it's incredible for how they choose to express themselves amongst the civil war. 

HM: And that’s the reason for this film, because people don't know Sudanese people, and I'm fed up with the numbers, “Okay, there are 12 million in this place, there is this, there is that”. First of all, we have to understand who are the Sundanese people and I wanted to represent them with their dignity. I wanted to spread the message to the world that these people are teaching us. 

I was learning from the Sudanese people, and it's always as if the world should learn from Europe. No, we have to learn from Africa. We have to learn from Sudanese people, and this is what I experienced. This is this experience that I am putting in the movie and sharing with the audience.

TNBFC: Another thing I was thinking about is the ending of the film, particularly that you see the reality that civil war and revolution didn’t end in this Hollywood-ised version of victory but the truth is many had to flee. However you show an equal and more important understanding of what they did to still refuse that system. 

HM: When I started the movie I was hoping to have this Hollywood, beautiful, happy-end, and I was believing. I said to myself I will film until they have free elections, and then the war started. I didn't want to go to film in the war, I didn't want to die in the war. But to be honest, I believed in the madania, and I still believe in the madania, and not only for Sudan, but for the whole region. My dream is to have madania everywhere, in Morocco, Nigeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan. We deserve the madania. We people from the Middle East, we people from Africa. I will never give up my hope and I think that death and war is part of history, but peace and democracy are also part of history, and it can happen.

I'm always fighting the storytelling of the West that presents things as a curse, because they want this curse to continue. Because what does war mean? It means the greedy people can continue to steal without having citizens able to reclaim their country. And the whole story of my film is about reclaiming Sudan. The people in my film, they're just like normal citizens reclaiming their country that has been stolen for so many years because it's such a rich country.

TNBFC: What did you see this film doing in the larger discourse around revolution? 

HM: The film is not explaining anything, it's not a movie where I give explanations. It's a movie that opens a door. My goal was that when people watch it, they feel close to the Sudanese. They say, “Oh, my God. I was thinking Sudan is so abroad for me, but in the end, the Sudanese people have the same dreams that I have for myself.” That's what I wanted. Then maybe people, when they see this film, and they meet young Sudanese people for real they can start to learn and understand about Sudan. 

TNBFC: While you say you don’t like to plan, what do you have in mind for the future? 

HM: My head is so full of many, many stories that I was experiencing these past 10 years. In the movies there is only 1% of what I experienced when I'm in a country or with some people, so I'm writing a fiction that is a kind of dystopia and is going to be inspired by real people I met, The fiction is going to give me the freedom to give a voice to things that sometimes are not possible to film because it's too dangerous for the people. It's going to give me this space where I can even express more of what I have already experienced by meeting all these incredible people in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Sudan, in Lebanon, all the countries where I was shooting the past 10 years.

TNBFC: That’s incredible and we can’t wait to see these movies!  

HM: You know, the reason why I do movies is because, since I was a kid I was shocked with the gap between my experience of Africa, because of my parents; my mom is from Algeria and Morocco, and my dad is from Tunisia so since I was a kid, I was spending all my holidays in these three countries. The experience I had of Africa then, compared to when I was coming back to Paris where I was born, there was a huge gap between how people represent Africa and my experience of Africa.That's the reason why I'm doing movies.

It is so important to bring different storytelling to the world, because there is this heavy way of presenting Africa that is so false, and always showing the continent as miserable or terrorism, or women not having their rights and nobody is reporting about the people who fight. Movies are happening in Africa and giving a voice to those that the media are making invisible. 

Sudan, Remember Us is in cinemas now.