Cotton Queen & Sudanese Stories | Suzannah Mirghani

“It's a miracle that any film exists, but a film made during conflict, even more so.” We sit down with filmmaker, writer, and academic Suzannah Mirghani to discuss her latest film, Cotton Queen, and the harrowing reality of creating art while Sudan faces an ongoing genocide. Suzannah reveals the heartbreaking journey of a production displaced by war, where the cast and crew were forced to flee to Egypt to find safety and a space to continue their work. We explore the "miracle" of Sudanese cinema, a movement that refuses to be erased despite the systemic destruction of the country's tangible and intangible heritage. Suzannah discusses how storytelling becomes a vital act of resistance, preserving Sudanese dialects and histories that are currently under threat of being lost forever.

 

00:00 Introduction

01:02 From the Classroom to the Screen

01:41 The Heart of Cotton Queen

03:15 Sudan Front and Center in Doha

05:11 Ancestral Echoes and Formative Memories

07:01 Subverting Traditional Narrative Structures

08:31 When Time Becomes the Antagonist

10:20 Interconnecting the Threads of History

12:21 Production Amidst Displacement

15:17 The Doha Film Institute as a Mentor

16:45 Cultivating an Imagined Community

18:41 Borrowed Moods and Stolen Shots

20:10 Writing Cinematic Poetry

22:52 Pushing Back Against the Monolith

24:14 The Intricacy of Approachable Characters

26:12 Preserving Culture Through Dialect

28:31 Collective Relief and the Weight of Nostalgia

31:34 Safeguarding an Endangered Language

32:40 Intentional Programming at Georgetown

35:46 Tangible Outputs: From Conferences to Books

37:57 Merging Academic Research with Scriptwriting

40:02 Essential Literature and Cinematic Gems

42:50 Teaching the Nuanced Histories of Sudan

 

Suzannah Mirghani is a Sudanese-Russian filmmaker and writer based in Doha, where she works as an editor at Georgetown University in Qatar. She is the writer and director of Al-Sit (2020), which won multiple international awards including the Canal+ Award at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival and several Academy Award–qualifying prizes. Her first feature film, Cotton Queen (2025), received the ArteKino Award at L’Atelier de la Cinéfondation at the Cannes Film Festival.

 

Connect with Suzannah Mirghani 👉 https://instagram.com/suzannahmirghani

Hosted by:

Mikey Muhanna 👉 https://www.instagram.com/mikey_mu/?hl=en-gb

 

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