Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation will launch its Arab Film Nights program tomorrow, Tuesday. Organized by the Foundation’s Cinema Committee, the event will run through Thursday.

Three films will be screened:

• Goodbye Julia (Sudan, 2023), directed by Mohamed Kordofani
• The Village Next to Paradise (Somalia, 2024), directed by Mo Harawe
• Scheherazade’s Dream (Egypt, 2014), directed by François Verster

Screenings begin at 6:30 p.m. in the Foundation’s cinema hall, followed by a discussion of the film’s events and an outdoor screening will take place at 8pm at the Foundation’s headquarters in Jabal Amman.

The screenings open tomorrow evening, Tuesday, with the Sudanese film “Goodbye Julia,” which boldly approaches one of the most painful chapters in Sudan’s modern history: the secession of the South. Director Mohamed Kordofani comes close to this deep wound not through direct political discourse, but through a tightly constructed human drama that places two women — one from the North and the other from the South — at the heart of a historical storm, telling the story of a homeland torn apart by divisions through the story of an almost impossible friendship between them.

Kordofani chooses for the events of “Goodbye Julia” to begin in Khartoum, six years before the secession of South Sudan, where the story opens with a violent scene: Sudanese citizens from the South burning and destroying the property of other citizens from the North. Amid this chaos, Mona causes the death of a Southern Christian man. But she does not face justice; instead, she hires his wife, Julia, as a maid in her home, in an attempt to rid herself of the guilt that haunts her.

Mona is a Northern Muslim woman who belongs to the bourgeois class. She was once a singer before giving up her voice to please her husband, Akram, and protect her strained marriage from collapse. Julia is a Southern, Christian, poor woman who sells bread by the roadside. Everything separates Mona and Julia: religion, color, class, history, and politics. Yet fate brings them together in a violent scene: Mona, in a moment of inattention, hits Julia’s young son with her car and flees. Her husband, Santino, chases her on his motorcycle, so Mona calls her husband and screams: “A Southerner is chasing me, Akram.” She does not mention the accident or the reason he is chasing her, and she does not give Santino a single chance to speak to her. When Santino reaches the door of Mona’s house, Akram — who is prejudiced against the people of the South — shoots him, and the man dies. Thus begins Mona’s journey of guilt.

This scene is the backbone of the entire film. One lie turns into an endless chain of lies and failed attempts at compensation. Mona does not tell Julia that she is the reason behind her husband’s death; rather, she tries to atone for her guilt through pity and material compensation. But Julia, who is searching for her missing husband, gradually becomes part of Mona’s life, and a complex relationship develops between them that goes beyond the boundaries of mistress and maid.

The final scenes of the film coincide with the referendum on the South’s secession from the North. During this time, we see Mona and Julia together, after the truth has been revealed, and after Julia has forgiven — or tried to forgive — Mona. We also discover that Julia, too, had hidden from the beginning her knowledge of Mona’s role in the killing of her husband. The film does not offer the viewer an easy happy ending. At the very moment Mona tries to free herself from her husband’s oppression and from her guilt complex, fighting erupts in Khartoum. Violence remains there, beyond the doors, waiting. The film ends as it began: in a Khartoum on the edge of the abyss. It leaves the viewer in a state of deep reflection on the possibility of forgiveness, reconciliation with oneself, and the acceptance by members of one people of one another. Through the relationship between Mona and Julia, it also explores the social contexts that led to the division between northern and southern Sudan.

“Goodbye Julia,” the first feature-length fiction film by director Mohamed Kordofani, not only represented Sudan at the Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category, but also won more than 37 international awards. It was selected for the Un Certain Regard competition at the Cannes International Film Festival, becoming the first Sudanese film in the history of the festival. The jury awarded it a prize bearing the name “Freedom Prize.”

The screening of the feature film “The Village Next to Paradise,” which will be shown the day after tomorrow, Wednesday, at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, came as a pleasant surprise to critics and cinema lovers around the world, given that it comes from Somalia, this poor country that still lives under the weight of violence and successive civil wars. It is also the first work by its young director, Mo Harawe, who completed it with dramatic and aesthetic precision and skill.

The film depicts the worlds of a simple village in a hot desert region of Somalia, inhabited by a family consisting of a father who works in several modest jobs, including burying the dead who fall as a result of the ongoing war. The father does his utmost to achieve a better life for his absent-minded yet intelligent son. Joining them is the father’s sister, whom he has recently welcomed after her separation from her husband. On the horizon, a series of difficult transformations looms over the village against the backdrop of the destructive civil wars taking place in the country, as well as the harshness of nature and the climate filled with dust and the smell of the fires of war. The film portrays relationships filled with hopes and pains. The young son constantly lives in a recurring dream that he has an appointment to live in paradise, which he imagines as something like a grocery store that allows him to choose whatever sweets and candies he wants. Also visible in the film, whose scenes are shot with eloquent fascination, is the deeply compassionate and tender relationship that brings together the father and his young son, and the father’s sister, who has come to live with them in the house and has a dream and ambition of opening a clothing-tailoring shop. In order to achieve this dream, she begins selling qat to residents and passersby. But the father, who is keen on educating his son, faces the problem of the only school in the village being closed due to the lack of financial resources.

The film, completed through a joint European collaboration, remained connected to the culture of its director’s origins, as he insisted on shooting his film in the natural locations of its events in his country, Somalia, located in eastern Africa, which is undergoing a difficult labor of political, social, historical, and developmental transformations. In its opening scenes, light is shed on excerpts from a television news bulletin about the elimination of an armed man from the air by an American drone. This condensed and rapid scene sketches the worlds of the film from the very beginning: a world rich with scenes of daily suffering, whether from harsh nature or as a result of what simple people there endure — scenes of killing, smuggling, destruction, wandering, and aborted dreams.

It is worth noting that director Harawe, who was born in Mogadishu, studied cinema in Germany before emigrating to Austria at the age of eighteen. There, he was able to complete several short films, including two whose events take place in Somalia. The first was titled “Life on the Horn” in 2020, which premiered at the Locarno Festival in Switzerland. The second film was titled “Will My Parents Come to See Me” in 2022, and premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.

The week concludes its screenings next Thursday with the film “The Dream of Shahrazad,” which represents an important milestone in the career of South African documentary filmmaker François Verster. Drawing on his anti-apartheid background, he presents a visual, musical, and perhaps heritage-based reading of the Arab Spring revolutions and the climate in the entire region. He attempts to offer an approach that creates a shared human space for understanding political transformations in the Middle East. The film employs the tale of “One Thousand and One Nights” as a political metaphor, making the figure of Shahrazad a strong link between artistic creativity and the act of resistance.

The work follows the paths of multiple artistic figures during that movement and its aftermath. We meet the Turkish orchestra conductor Cem Mansur and the director of the Egyptian El Warsha troupe, Hassan El Geretly, along with several musicians, actors, and visual artists such as Hani El Masri. The lives of these artists intersect with the crowds in the squares, and the film conveys the states of their artistic interaction or even their involvement in the political event. The work highlights their profound questions about the usefulness of art and its actual role when ordinary people decide to make their history with their own hands in the streets.

The structure of the film is organized into four sections that echo Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphony “Scheherazade,” which forms the background of the work, placing heritage in confrontation with the present and tracing the stages of the revolution and its direct repercussions. The director combines excerpts from cinematic embodiments of the stories of One Thousand and One Nights in world cinema — including the classic animated film “The Adventures of Prince Achmed” — alongside live orchestral performances, real interviews, and documentary coverage, in order to build his narrative fabric, which relies on atmosphere rather than on a narrative line or an event. In this context, the tale of Shahrazad represents a contemporary political structure that embodies the artist’s steadfastness in the face of oppressive authority using diverse tools of expression. In the story, Shahrazad used to tell stories to stay alive, and the end of the story meant death. The work distances itself from simplifying a complex reality, avoiding any beautification of successive failures.

The film depicts moments of preparation for some performances and rehearsals, encounters with the people whose stories the artists of El Warsha troupe choose to tell, the daily lives of the artists, and the racial discrimination to which Cem Mansur is subjected. It also takes us with a young Lebanese actress to filming locations and on her journey in search of a suitable atmosphere for her art.