You Will Die at 20, by Amjad Abu Alala (Germany, Egypt, Norway, Qatar, Sudan, 2019, 105’) Fiction.

The film premiered in Spain at the seventeenth edition of the Tarifa-Tangier African Film Festival of 2020, winning the Best Film Award “for its wonderful film language, for the values it represents, for showing how a young man works and fights against preconceived ideas, under the burdens of religion and tradition, and how he decides to wake up the world.”

Plot summary: Sudan’s Aljazira province in the present day. Shortly after Muzamil’s birth, the village’s religious chief predicts his death at the age of 20. Muzamil’s father cannot come to terms with this curse and abandons his family. His mother Sakina takes care of her son on her own and grows overprotective. One day, however, Muzamil turns  19 years old…

Amjad Abu Alala. A Sudanese director and producer, he is currently based in the United Arab Emirates. He has worked as a film and documentary director for Arab and Western channels. As a producer and director, he has made many short films. He heads the Programming Committee of the Sudan Independent Film Festival and is the Sudanese representative at the Arab Film Institute.

Talking About Trees, by Suhaib Gasmelbari  (Germany, Chad, France, Qatar, Sudan, 2019, 93’) Documentary.

The documentary format used in Talking About Trees allowed Gasmelbari not only to talk about the facts, but also to increase awareness about the precarious work of preserving the country’s  national film archives, and the restrictions on radio broadcasting in Sudan.

Plot summary: Ibrahim, Soliman, Manar and Altayeb are filmmakers who have remained friends for over 45 years. They are all idealists with a great sense of humanity. They meet up again after many years living far apart and exile, to breathe life back into an old dream: making cinema a reality in Sudan. They are determined to leave their mark behind and spread their love for film.

Suhaib Gasmelbari was born in Sudan in 1979, where he lived until the age of 16. He studied filmmaking in France at the University of Paris VIII. He has written and directed several short-subject films, both fiction and documentaries. In his work as a film archive researcher, he has recovered old Sudanese films and actively participated in the digitization of Sudanese works of cinema. When he returned, he filmed Forgotten Films of Sudan (2017), which discusses the precarious preservation of films in Sudan, and Talking About Trees (2019), about the distribution of films in that country.