Cotton Queen review – mystery, matriarchs and magic in pioneering Sudanese debut
Suzannah Mirghani’s first feature contains a powerful performance by Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud as a village’s elder woman and tackles the long shadow of British imperialism and women’s rights‘I decide my past,” says a village matriarch in this intriguingly political and poetic drama from Suzannah Mirghani, making her feature debut – and with it becoming the first Sudanese woman to direct a feature. (She was forced to cancel the original shoot in Sudan when war broke out in 2023, moving production to Egypt.) It’s a film with things to say about the long shadow of the British empire, neocolonialism, women’s rights and female genital mutilation. But it mostly says it all without undermining its sense of mystery and shivers of magic realism.We’re in present day Sudan, where village elder Al-Sit (Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud) is an iron-willed woman not to be messed with. Everyone knows the story of how
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