As Sudan faces devastating conflict, one film is keeping space alive for stories of love, community, memory, and a different future.
If you’re looking for something different to watch this weekend, Cotton Queen is worth experiencing on the big screen, particularly for its beautifully told story of a side of Sudan that rarely makes it into the headlines.
Written in 2020 before the ongoing conflict, the critically acclaimed film by Doha-based Sudanese-Russian writer-director Suzannah Mirghani is currently screening as part of the Doha Film Institute (DFI) Cinema Contemporary Releases series at the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA).
The film screens at the MIA Auditorium on September 23-26 at 7pm.
It is in Arabic with Arabic and English subtitles. Tickets are available through the DFI website.
“It’s a dream come true for me to screen my film at the Museum of Islamic Art,” Mirghani told Gulf Times. “I’ve only ever sat in the audience at the MIA, so to stand on stage and present my film to a Qatar-based audience was an extraordinary experience.”
Cotton Queen is not simply a film about Sudan, but about people, memory, identity, tradition, change, and the journey of growing up.
It’s a film with themes that feel especially relevant given what the country is going through today.
“With all the devastation currently raging in Sudan, the film provides a creative space in which to imagine a happier future for the country, where sunlight, cotton fields and the Nile River are bountiful, and where strong-willed individuals share love, poetry, and meaningful resilience,” Mirghani said.
Cotton Queen is her feature-film debut, but the film has already made an impressive journey internationally.
It premiered at Venice Critics’ Week in 2025 and went on to receive major recognition at film festivals, including the prestigious Golden Alexander (Theo Angelopoulos prize) for Best Film at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and the Audience Award at the inaugural Doha Film Festival.
It has also received awards and recognition at festivals including Carthage, Geneva’s FIFDH, Luxor, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and Durban, among others.
The film takes audiences deep into a Sudanese community, following 15-year-old Nafisa as she navigates family expectations, tradition, marriage, modernisation and her own desire to determine her future.
Set in a cotton-farming village, the film places Sudanese women and girls at the centre of the story, bringing together three generations and exploring questions of identity, power, girlhood and choice.
“By following a young Sudanese girl’s story, it was important for me to show how everyday, ordinary life is and can be lived,” she said.
“Every time I watch Cotton Queen with a Sudanese audience, it brings me so much joy to hear them laughing at the jokes, humming along to the songs, reacting to the drama and enjoying the moment, despite what is currently happening in the country,” Mirghani added.
The production itself was affected by the conflict in Sudan.
The cast and crew were displaced and eventually reunited in Egypt, where they continued filming.
“I wrote the script for Cotton Queen before the current war, and so I did not address the ongoing atrocities within the story,” Mirghani said. “The actual production of the film was affected by the displacement of the Sudanese cast and crew to Egypt, and we were all emotionally disappointed to move the production away from Sudan.”
“It became the only practical solution if we wanted to complete the film,” she continued. “On set, there was an extraordinary sense of community, and we came together to make this film as a positive creative project, despite the difficulties the country is going through.”
The film may have been completed away from Sudan, but the country remains at its heart.
Its language, stories, traditions and memories are part of what the filmmaker was determined to preserve.
In that sense, making Cotton Queen became more than simply completing a movie.
It became an act of holding on. This is perhaps where the film becomes bigger than its 94-minute running time.
Mirghani said audiences hardly get to experience another side of Sudanese life – the tender, everyday moments between family members, for example, or the lived experiences of adolescent girls, and the way they laugh, sing, and interact with each other and their environments.
“I am incredibly grateful to the Doha Film Institute for supporting this film from the very start, and to the mentorship and guidance of Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir,” she said.
“Sudan’s onscreen image has mostly played out on the news, with footage of war and destruction,” Mirghani added. “Yes, these horrific events continue to tear the country apart, but love and community continue to bring people together.”
“There is a very real threat of cultural memory being erased in Sudan because of the war,” she continued. “Not only is cinema an important audiovisual archive for the future, it also becomes an emotional archive, preserving thoughts, loves, poetry and desires.”
“The magical realist elements in my film are about imagining a new Sudan,” Mirghani said.