In a verdant green field at dusk, teenage girls pull at the ripe heads of cotton stalks, one tuft at a time. Between shots of laughing, singing, clapping and jointly cringing at a TikTok video, their joy is palpable. This opening scene from Cotton Queen, a new feature written and directed by Sudanese-Russian filmmaker Suzannah Mirghani and produced by Strange Bird, Maneki Films, and Philistine Films, is a portrait of universally recognised girlhood.
It’s through this lens of late adolescence that Mirghani chose to explore larger themes of colonialism, neocolonialism and women’s rights in Sudan. The story follows the earnestly romantic Nafisa, a 15-year-old girl living in a Sudanese cotton-farming village. Raised on stories from her grandmother and village matriarch, Al-Sit, of battling British colonisers, she eyes the arrival of a young businessman and his genetically modified cotton with suspicion.
The film is shot with natural light; the scenes are bright, vibrant, backed by humour and a soft streak of magical realism. Mirghani says the story is a collection of childhood memories from Sudan – she herself was a teenager when she and her family left, and there is a simmering nostalgia throughout the film as a consequence.
“You see a very kind of naïve, childlike, magical story, and at the same time, there’s kind of an underlying history of violence that runs through the whole story,” says Mirghani. “And of course, my concern is always women. Sudanese women. I don’t think there’s enough about Sudanese women, especially in fiction.”
