Sudan Trilogy and Arthur Howes film legacy revisited

Free screenings, panels and dialogues

Saturday 29 November 2014

SOAS, Kahlili Lecture Theatre

Nearest tube: Euston Square/Russell Square

Programme details to be announces shortly.

These films will be screened

Kafi’s Story (53 mins, 1989)

Shot in 1989, Kafi's Story captures Nuba life at the moment before it was engulfed in the Sudanese civil war. Kafi narrates his own story into a portable tape record as he travels from his village, Torogi, to Khartoum to earn enough money to buy a new dress for his second wife, Tete. Kafi is quite consciously negotiating his own path between modernity and tradition.

Kafi and the other Nuba react to the presence of the camera with neither awe nor apprehension; they seem to welcome the camera as an extension of their open, out-going, hospitable lifestyle. At the same time, they rapidly become sophisticated about the way film conventions can frame reality. When a friend walks away from a shot, they joke that he is walking into the screen. At the film's end Kafi asks the filmmaker for one thing: a camera of his own.

NUBA CONVERSATIONS (53 minutes, 1999)

Ten years after he made Kafi's Story, Arthur Howes returns to the Sudan to find the members of the Nuba who featured in his earlier documentary film. Soon after he had left the Sudan, the mountain area they had been living in became the battlefield of the civil war that has been destroying much of the Sudan ever since. With a government that is attempting to gain absolute control, the people of Nuba have been persecuted, deported, and deprived of much of their land. Children have been put into camps, many of them brainwashed in the military. Many of their fathers have voluntarily joined the army and are now being forced to fight their own people, as they have not been able to find any other way of making a living. Some of the Nuba people have fled to other countries, such as Ethiopia and Kenya. Groups of women have withdrawn further into the mountains. Howes, who had a great deal of difficulty obtaining a visa for the Sudan, manages to find several of the Nuba men and women he filmed back in the late eighties, and their testimonies are, without exception, revealing. He succeeds in organizing secret screenings of Kafi's Story, which they have never seen before, and the contrast between their lives then and now is shocking. It is rare to hear stories collected from so deeply within a community. Howes gives his personal perspective during much of his commentary.

BENJAMIN AND HIS BROTHER (87 minutes, 2002)

Years of war and ethnic conflict in the Sudan have created a generation of young men, known as the "Lost Boys," who have spent more years in refugee camps than in their home communities. This intimate film recounts the story of Benjamin and William Deng, brothers joined in the struggle of a seemingly never-ending exile, who are then separated when one is accepted into a United States resettlement program while the other remains in a Kenyan refugee camp.