Qatar-based Sudanese filmmaker Suzannah Mirghani had made six shorts before developing her 2020 award winner Al-Sit into the feature Cotton Queen. It had a world premiere this year in Venice Critics’ Week before embarking on a healthy festival run around the world.
Mirghani’s filmmaking career began in 2010, the same year Doha Film Institute (DFI) was established. A researcher and graduate in media and museum studies, she was born in Sudan and moved with her family to Qatar as a teenager. “Growing up in Sudan, we didn’t have access to the latest films, but my sisters and I would watch Hollywood and Bollywood films on VHS tapes on repeat,” she recalls.
Mirghani’s father would sometimes take the children to watch a film in an open-air cinema. Even with paint peeling from the walls on which they were projected, she says these experiences were “exciting and magical”.
Once in Qatar, Mirghani was an early adopter of the professional film education and practical opportunities offered by DFI, which helped lay the foundations for her debut feature with proof-of-concept short Al-Sit.
Cotton Queen is a co-production between Sudan, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with Caroline Daube’s Strange Bird and Didar Domehri’s Maneki Films as lead producers. In the film, Mirghani tackles feminist themes with cinematic storytelling that cements her arrival as a new voice in the MENA industry.
“Cotton Queen was a beauty pageant for girls working in the cotton industry during Sudan’s British colonial period,” explains Mirghani. “The film reappropriates this title to reflect contemporary Sudanese girls awakening to their own power, beyond beauty and marriage.”
Currently at work on a script for her second feature, Mirghani says she hopes to film in Sudan after the ongoing war in the country forced her to move the Cotton Queen shoot to Egypt. “Cotton Queen took five years to make,” says the resilient Mirghani. “I hope in five years I will have made my second feature.”
Contact: Suzannah Mirghani
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