Behind what could be a simple tale of a young girl coming of age in Sudan, filmmaker Suzannah Mirghani’s debut feature weaves an extraordinary and cautionary tale of respect for one’s self and for the environment around us, which are always crucially, and importantly intertwined.
We first met Nafisa in Sudanese-Russian, Doha-based filmmaker Suzannah Mirghani’s 2020 proof of concept short, the award winning Al-Sit. At the time, Nafisa was 15 and her grandmother Al-Sit was overlooking the debate brewing around trying to arrange a marriage for the teenager. The short, which qualified for being entered in the Academy Awards race after winning the Grand Prix award at the Tampere International Film Festival in 2021 in Finland, was beautifully made and, like all good proof of concept shorts, written to entice the viewer (and investors) into wanting more. It left me, well you guessed it, craving for more — much, much more. I had to live with a few other wonderful shorts by Mirghani, who has a keen and funny cinematic sense, above many of her peers. Until now.
Fast forward five years and Nafisa (Mihad Murtada) is now on the verge of blossoming into a beautiful, strong-willed young woman, complete with a charmingly cute local boy love interest, Babiker (Talaat Fareed) who was also present in the short but less prevalently so. And in Cotton Queen, Al-Sit (Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud) is still her cantankerous, powerful, hauntingly cool self, though at times humorous with her granddaughter, and very mischievous.
With more time to tell her story, this time around Mirghani manages a wondrous tale of a female heroine, one unlike any we have ever watched before on the big screen. I’m not exaggerating here, because it is rarest that one gets to witness a heroine who possesses at once strength but also vulnerability, power but also powerlessness, as well as good intentions coupled with what could be bad ideas. I loved that about Cotton Queen and the film even manages an ending which left me breathless and anchored in my seat, wondering “what did I just watch?!”
But a bit of story to make sense of my ramblings. Nafisa is a young woman who picks cotton for her grandmother Al-Sit in the vast cotton fields of Sudan, along with other girls her age. Al-Sit insists on the girls’ purity as her cotton otherwise will be tainted and the women who come from neighboring towns and villages to bargain with her will not purchase it. This group of intertwined women of all ages live in a village in the heart of the Sudan and follow traditions, up to certain point. The younger generations also possess mobile phones, this is how the present day creeps in, which makes the film even more hauntingly perfect. And that’s how they see where the cotton they pick ends up, giggling about the influencers they scroll through online.
And Nafisa is a kind of disruptor, as we learn little by little, perhaps the worthy heir of her grandmother’s infamous legacy. The title of the film refers to a colonial era contest held in Sudan, where the prettiest girl in the village was crowned “Cotton Queen”. Was Al-Sit once the winner of that? The viewer will have to decide for themselves.
Into this mix, one day a young man named Bilal (Mohamed Musa) enters the story. He is the heir of a cotton empire which used to control the village at the time of the British Empire. He is coming to take control of the family “empire”, complete with a dusty, rundown mansion with great potential, and fields. But he carries with him some magic beans, in the form of genetically modified cotton seeds which do not themselves bear any plantable seeds at the end of the harvesting. As we all know from the Monsanto days, this is so that the company can continue to sell their product and, in the process, destroy small farming as an industry. Family farmers depend on the company to buy their seeds, year after year, crop after crop and the cultural legacy of the product, as well as their earnings, decrease — until eventually a big conglomerate sweeps in and makes a killing.
Yet there are mystical powers held by Nafisa, something she inherited from Al-Sit, who is herself rumored to have killed a British general in the very mansion Bilal has come to occupy. It’s not that she is magical, not in the fairy tale, fairy dust meaning of the word. It’s more that Nafisa is a young African feminist, in the very best possible meaning of that term. As a young girl, she even fought off a repressive, old fashioned ritual which is meant to take adolescents into womanhood and, as a result, changed the fate of all the young women in her village. This makes her a perfect heroine, even if her means to get the right results may sometimes be a bit imperfect.
At the heart of the film is Mirghani’s spellbinding narrative and visual style, the way she uses what she is given — like when she and the crew were ready to begin shooting in Sudan, the 2023 war broke out and made the production switch all shooting and locations to Egypt — to tell her wondrous tale of courage and womanhood. When one meets her in person, it is clear what the filmmaker brings to all her work: herself. In all her glorious multicultural wisdom and beauty.
When asked about her character’s use of poetry and song in the film, to also aid the narration, Mirghani said: “Because of the many restrictions on Sudanese girls’ behavior and their set social roles and expectations, there are not many ways in which they can maneuver, speak their minds, or break free from strict social control. Music, songs, and poetry are some of the few places in which girls find release, where they can compose lyrics that would be unacceptable in any other social context. Wedding songs and working songs are largely made up of naughty lyrics in which girls have fun and find a sense of freedom.
I hope my film helps to advance the rights of young girls to speak up for themselves in similar situations and I hope it gives the necessary space for those in positions of power to empathize with young girls who have been marginalized, despite the family’s attempts at protecting them.”
Amen, I say to that. And Inshallah.
Cotton Queen world premiered in Venice’s Critics Week sidebar and is a A Strange Bird, Maneki Films & Philistine Films Production; co-produced by ZDF/Das Kleine Fernsehspiel in Collaboration with ARTE. The film also received support from the Doha Film Institute, AFAC and the Red Sea Fund, a Red Sea International Film Festival Initiative.
Image courtesy of Strange Bird, used with permission.