Africa Is a Country

5 Questions for a Filmmaker–Taghreed Elsanhouri

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

5 Questions for a Filmmaker–Taghreed Elsanhouri

By
Katarina Hedrén

Taghreed Elsanhouri directed the first Sudanese film to be screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, “All about Darfur,” in 2005. That same year the film also won the Chairperson’s Prize at the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF). Her other credits include ‘Sudanna al Habib’ (2012) and ‘Mother Unknown‘ (2009). This interview is the second in a series. Archived here.

What is your first film memory?

My first film memory is the first film I saw on the big screen. It was an Arabic film called Laylat Alqabt Ala Fatima (The Night Fatima was Arrested), based on a novella by Egyptian journalist and writer, Sakina Fu’ad. She was part of a group of women who wrote about the role of women in a changing society.

Why did you decide to become a filmmaker?

At one point in my life, when I was still working in broadcasting, I suffered from a stint of writer’s block, which made me feel like The Little Mermaid. I felt as if I had lost my voice–that it had been sold or stolen somewhere along the way. Making films became my way to recover my voice.

Which already made film do you wish you had made?

I recently saw British/Ghanaian filmmaker and co-founder of the Black Audio Film Collective John Akomfrah’s exhibition ‘Hauntologies‘ in London and I’m grateful to him for this work, in particular for giving life, through visualization, to a black man and woman who appear in a 16th century painting. Although I do not feel comfortable wishing I had made already made works, I aspire to make films that recover lost voices as perfectly and beautifully as Akomfrah.

Name one of the films on your top-5 list and the reason why it is there.

Babette’s Feast by Danish director Gabriel Axel, because it deals with the human impulse to give back, and the poetry of memory.

Ask yourself any question you think I should have asked and answer it.

What was your motivation for making your latest film Our Beloved Sudan? I wanted the footprints of my country to appear in the history, and to tell a story about the partition of my country from a Sudanese perspective.

* The ‘5 Questions for a Filmmaker …’ series is archived here.

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.