Female Filmmakers in Focus: Hind Meddeb on “Sudan, Remember Us” (August 6, 2025)
Filmed in the wake of a revolution that gave way to a military coup, Hind Meddeb’s powerfully poetic documentary “Sudan, Remember Us” introduces to the world a generation of Sudanese activists, street poets, and ordinary people who are determined to fight for their freedom no matter what. This includes the film’s protagonists—Shajane, Maha, Muzamil, Khatab—and the voice of poet Chaikhoon, who have built a community together through their dreams of freedom and use of their artistic voices to shout their beliefs above the din of the militia’s bombs. The film premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival last year, before screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, and a plethora of other festivals around the globe over the past year.
Born in Paris to a linguist mother of Moroccan and Algerian descent and a poet father of Tunisian descent, Meddeb formed her worldview growing up between France, Morocco, and Tunisia. She studied at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, holds a Master of Philosophy degree from Paris West University Nanterre La Défense, and has also studied German language and literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, as well as conducted research at the Free University of Berlin. Her work as a journalist has taken her all over the world and been broadcast on channels across the globe, including Planète TV in France, RTS in Switzerland, RTP in Portugal, Al Jazeera, and more.
Her feature films reflect her North African roots, as seen in her debut film “Electro Shaabi,” which explores the titular new music genre popular in the slums of Cairo, combining folk song, electro beats, and freestyle rap. Her second film, “Tunisia Clash,” follows various figures of the Tunisian rap scene as they clash with police and those in power. She then made “Paris Stalingrad,” along with co-director Thim Naccache, about the refugees, including those from Sudan, who call the streets of Paris’ Stalingrad district home. During the film’s release, the revolution in Sudan had begun, prompting Meddeb’s Sudanese friends to encourage her to document the situation in their country. The resulting film, “Sudan, Remember Us,” is a lyrical ode to the strength of the Sudanese people, and a tribute to the eternal power of poetry and creating art as a tool of resistance.
For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke to Meddeb about screening the film for Sudanese refugees, the immortality of poetry, the human stories at the heart of her film, and her hopes for a more empathetic world.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
At the film’s premiere at TIFF, several Sudanese refugees attending the screening discussed during the Q&A how this film reminded them of their country, of stories that had happened, and of their own personal experiences. I know you’ve shown this film in many places since then, and I was wondering how hearing those reactions makes you feel, as a filmmaker, knowing your film is touching lives like that?
The most powerful screening I experienced was in May of this year in Calais, in northern France. It’s at the border with England. Sudan was a British colony, so many Sudanese people have immigrated to England for a long time, often with family and relatives already there. When they leave the country due to the war or political reasons, they have been going to England for years, but the border is now closed. It’s almost impossible to cross this border or even obtain the necessary papers to travel to England. It’s been like that for years.
We organized this screening in Calais, and approximately 250 Sudanese people attended. We organized it in collaboration with an NGO that supports local communities. It’s called Secours Catholique, which is the last NGO that is allowed to do this work, because the police are very, very brutal, the French police. Also, England is giving a lot of money to France to stop the people at the border. So the screening was incredible. They told us that they organize a lot of events, but this was the first time everybody came. Mothers with babies attended the screenings. There were so many people that some had to sit on the ground. The cinema was full, full, full. So it was quite impressive. And it was almost only Sudanese people, and also the French people, who were supporting and who knew them.
At the end, it was incredible. There were a lot of young people in their twenties, and some of them wanted to talk, so they took the mic. One young man said he wanted to show the bullets that were in his body, which he received during the revolution. He said, “Everything that is in the film, I was experiencing it. On this day, at this demonstration, this happened. You left just five minutes before they started to shoot. And some of our friends were killed that day.” Other attendees were recognizing the buildings where they were living, and they said, “I should have been in the film. I saw my friend in the film.” It was crazy. They were sharing their experiences. And then at the end, when we came out of the cinema, some of them came to me and they wanted to hug me, and they said, “You gave us back our pride, because we forgot totally about what we did during the revolution. Because after the revolution, we had to go through the war, and after the war, we wanted to escape the war. So we had to travel to Europe, and we almost died so many times. And now we are at this border, and we are trying to cross.” Most of them were wounded, with broken legs, and such. They were young, like little wounded birds.
It was terrible. I just wanted to hug every one of them. They also said they were humiliated everywhere; by the military during the war, by the people in Libya and in Europe, and they had forgotten where they came from, what they accomplished. They said, “Thank you for making this film, because it’s like keeping such a precious memory of something we did, and we should never forget. You gave us back our pride.”
I think it was the most powerful screening from a year of traveling around the world and presenting the film at multiple festivals and in various countries. That day, I decided I had to go back to Calais and sit, making portraits of everyone there, and so I’m going to do it as soon as I finish the tour. I’m coming to the US next week, and I also have the film’s release in Tunisia. It had already been released in England and France. It was very successful because in France we have a lot of independent cinema. We didn’t expect it to do so well, to be honest, because it’s a very small production. I did everything by myself. I mean, the filming, I didn’t have a team. So it’s really a film that was made with heart, humbly. It was a lot of time and love. That day, at the screening in Calais, I felt like I hadn’t done this movie for nothing.
But there is also a lot of pain. When I was in England, there was a lot of pain from the Sudanese community, people saying their country is being destroyed. There is nothing left. Saying everything I filmed was destroyed. What do you say to that? I was facing so much pain at every screening. There were numerous community screenings with NGOs, so in England, people from Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan attended to watch the movie. They said, “We recognize ourselves in Sudanese history. It’s the same that happened to our country.” Since I was a kid, I have seen so many countries being destroyed by war in the region, in the Middle East and North Africa. So there is a lot of pain.
You mentioned that many of the people coming are young. And, obviously, the film focuses on this younger, united generation that sees more connections with each other than they see differences, and specifically, I think, a goal of shared freedom, as opposed to capitalism coming in and strip-mining the country and hoarding the resources. Do you think, from what you’ve seen, both in making this film and playing this film around and where we are as a global world, that there is hope with this young generation?
Right now, the situation is very critical, so no, the fire is not there, but there are Sudanese people all over the world, like the Palestinian people. There is a huge diaspora, like the Lebanese people, the Iraqi people, and the Syrian people. Millions of people had to leave their country because of all these multiple wars. These people, they keep in the heart, this fire. That’s why this film is very important. I mean, the film is just a tool. When I say the film, it’s the poetry, the writings, all these things that the Sudanese people create. Among the Sudanese community, people are writing book,s and there are other movies done by Sudanese people that are beautiful. Through art, this memory is preserved for future generations, and the fire remains alive outside Sudan. Right now in Sudan, it’s just about surviving, and there are massacres every day.
However, based on my personal vision of the world, I think we should never give up. And, of course, when the military does what it does, it wants to rule the storytelling. And so one of the reasons for the war is to erase the memory of the revolution. To destroy the revolution and to leave so many dead people on the road that you only see death, and then you forget everything that happened before. So that’s why it’s so important to do art, because as the people say in the film, when you write a poem, through the poem, even if you’re killed, the poem will continue to go on its way, and you’re going to continue to live through the poem.
That’s the meaning of the title of the film, because at the end of the film, you see a young man with a yellow shirt. His name is Karim, and he’s saying a poem. He says, these bullets were waking us up, were waking the youth up, and this bullet that killed you, brings us all together to take to the streets. This poem, I didn’t know when I was filming it, because that night it was an Iftar in memory of El Raya, the young boy who was killed just a few months after the military coup. Raya is the same one who is painted on the wall, and Muzamil, who is the painter, was his best friend. They were childhood friends. Karim, when he recites this poem, it is in the memory of Raya. What I didn’t know was that this poem was written by Raya. It was first recited during the demonstration by him, and it became a famous poem because someone filmed him, uploaded the video to YouTube, and then other kids started to learn it by heart. So through the poem, Raya that day, his voice was again among the people. This is something I wasn’t even aware of when I was filming. When I was editing and showing the footage to Muzamil, the painter, he told me the whole story.
The last poem in the film is by Chaikhoon, a very young poet. He’s like 20 years old, and he doesn’t even consider himself a poet. He’s a computer engineer for a bank, specifically the Bank of Khartoum, but now he works in Doha, in the United Arab Emirates. Chaikhoon puts himself in the body of someone who was killed in a demonstration, and he gives a voice to a young demonstrator who was killed. From Paradise, from the sky, he’s telling the poem to his friends, and he’s saying, “When peace will come back, remember me. When you reconstruct the country, remember me. When you plant a tree, and this tree is going to be delicious with sugary fruits, and you’re going to taste them, remember me. So that is the title of the film. The idea of the title came from this poem, because the idea is, “I’m dead, but please continue to remember me through my poems, through my art, through what I accomplished, so I didn’t die for nothing.”
This is the same idea that Muzamil in the film is saying at a certain point, when he says parents, when they lose a kid, they don’t want revenge, they don’t want blood, they don’t want the military to be killed. They just want their kid to have died for something. They want democracy. And what is democracy? It’s like collecting garbage, having a public school for free for everyone, having a public hospital where anyone who is sick can be healed, and having nice roads so that we can have our country. This is the reason for this whole revolution.
The Sudanese people, when they did this revolution, just wanted to reclaim their country, because Sudan, for years, has been a stolen country. In the West, we always present Sudan as a poor country waiting for charity or humanitarian aid. But it’s not that; It’s a very rich country. Sudan doesn’t need anyone because it has a vast amount of land, which provides fruits, and it has enough food to sustain its population. They could feed the whole continent. This is what the British colonists used to say: “With the agriculture of Sudan, you can feed the whole continent.
The second thing is that there is gold, uranium, and oil. So the country could be so rich. The people in Sudan are very educated, and so they are aware of that and of the neighbors who are always trying to start wars to steal the country. This is the entire story of Sudan, and it’s very important because it’s an untold story that remains largely invisible in the media. What I try to do with my films, particularly with this one, is to give a voice to them. And also make people from Western Europe aware of this story. People like me, I’m European, but I’m also African, and it’s maybe because I’m in between the two worlds that I’m aware of it. So I’m also trying to help people from America open their eyes and understand what is happening in Africa, which is very far from the storytelling of the mainstream media.
You mentioned other films, and I know “Khartoum” premiered at Sundance. Ibrahim Snoopy Ahmad, one of the film’s co-directors, filmed some of the footage that you used. Were you two communicating while you were working on your films? How did you guys sort of start working Snoopy?
I met him when I was in Khartoum and had already been working on my film for a few years. I met Snoopy during the military coup. All the footage that is really close to the military was filmed by Snoopy. Because he was very brave and not afraid, he was really at the front line of the demonstration. But, no, we didn’t communicate. I was working more closely with the people featured in the film, and I remain in contact with them. We did a short movie where they all give news about where they are and what they are doing. Shajan came with me to the film’s premiere at Venice, and she came with me to the Marrakesh Film Festival. Muzamil came with me to the Netherlands. Now he’s there. He’s asking for asylum there. We all went together to the Doha Film Festival. We are a very strong group, with every single person in the film.
You stay rooted in the lives of these activists and these people whose stories you followed, and then at the end, you have all these facts. I think many American documentaries, in particular, begin with the facts, and then we may get to the human stories. So many documentaries now are filled with screens of facts, and then they lose sight of the humanity at the heart of whatever story they’re trying to tell. In your film, you get to know and love these people and understand their dreams for their country. Then at the end, you’re like, also, here are these facts you need to know. How did you land on this structure for your film?
No. I had a big fight with the producer, because they wanted me to do a voiceover with a lot of facts. So, I tried. At first, I did a voiceover in French, because I’m not very good at Arabic. My Arabic is like speaking Arabic with my grandma. It was a significant effort to write it in Arabic, so I first wrote a voiceover in French with a lot of facts explaining the whole situation, as my producer had encouraged me to do so. But the film was rejecting it. It was very strange. It was as if the film were an organic body, like something alive, a human being. And with the editor, Gladys Joujou, who is Lebanese, she speaks Arabic like me. We were like, no, it doesn’t work. It’s killing the vibe because the whole film was really made as a friendship.
It began with my friendship with Sudanese people in Paris, which I had formed during my previous movie. They pushed me to go to Sudan. I didn’t go to Sudan as a journalist who’s going to cover a war, a military coup, or a revolution. I went to discover the country with my friends, and when I arrived, I made new friends. You said I was understanding their dreams. It’s even more than that. I was sharing their dreams because their dreams are also my dreams for my own countries, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, and the whole continent, as I have family and friends all over. I was living in Egypt. I was living in Morocco. I have family in Tunisia, in Algeria, and in Morocco. My mom was living in Syria, in Egypt, in Lebanon. So I have such a strong connection to all these countries. And I love them so much, and I badly want them to have their countries back.
It’s more than democracy. And by the way, the word in Arabic, madaniyy, means democracy, because democracy comes from demos, which means people, and cracy, which means power; power to the people. And madaniyy means citizen in Arabic. So the citizens’ government means citizens want their country back. This is my dream for the whole world. When I was shooting in 2019, a revolution was also happening in Algeria, specifically in Al Hirak, where one million people would gather in the streets every Friday. It’s the country of my grandmother on my mother’s side, and I was crying the first time I saw it.
If I could, I would have filmed in Algeria. There was also a sit-in at the same time in Baghdad in Iraq, with young people saying, “We are fed up with all these war leaders and war groups and clans and tribes, and we just want to leave. We don’t want war, and we want insecurity to stop.” At the same time, it began in Lebanon in the spring of 2019. It was also in Chile, because the prices were skyrocketing, and there was a right-wing president. They threw him out. In Russia, there were demonstrations, hundreds of people in the streets trying to remove a pro-Putin guy. In Hong Kong, people were fighting against the Chinese government’s change to the Constitution. Then, when the war started in Ukraine, it was very impressive, because there were demonstrations every day in Sudan. It was during the military coup, and the Sudanese people came to the streets with Ukrainian flags in solidarity with the Ukrainian people, because they have the same problem in Sudan. Wagner and the Russian people are present, supporting the militia, and exchanging gold for weapons, which are then given to committees in exchange for gold. The militia, in turn, gives gold to Putin. Russia has been involved in the wars in Sudan for years. So the Sudanese people hate Putin, and they understood that, of course, the Ukrainian people were paying for the revolution of 2014, where they kicked out the pro-Russian president. So everywhere where people are trying to make a revolution and reclaim their countries.
Back to the voiceover. I did it in French. It didn’t work. And then I had the idea with the editor that we should use the voice messages we were exchanging. I didn’t even know I’m going to use them at first. It was just the way we were communicating all the time. Then when we used it, we had this idea to create a voiceover that would be like a letter, like an open letter, so it’s not really a voiceover, it’s more written, and it’s a way to address the Sudanese people, rather than a voiceover that is giving you the facts from above.
The other reason I didn’t want to provide facts is that anyone can open the New York Times or The Guardian and read news about what’s happening in Sudan, but the film is giving something different. It’s giving a vision from the inside, something intimate, so you could feel close to the people, and at the end, it’s the opposite of what the news does, and that’s why we didn’t want to use facts. Some Americans, I know, are very frustrated. I was reading some reviews where people say, “We don’t understand this film,” because they’re not accustomed to this kind of filmmaking. However, many people in the audience disagreed. They said, “We’re so close to the Sudanese people.” And we, the Sudanese people, can share things with them.
What do you hope people will feel when they’ve finished watching your film?
I believe that as human beings, nobody wants to live in a war, and ultimately, war cannot last forever. The most horrific wars have an end, and peace always returns. It’s a movie I made because I deeply believe peace is going to return. This film is a tribute to people who deeply believe in peace and create space for it, as well as how to survive in times of war. As human beings, when you’re in such terrible times, the only way you have is through poetry, writing, and art. That’s the way to stay a human being. So I hope that when people watch this film, it’s going to inspire them and show them that as human beings, we all have that in common, and that Sudan is not a faraway country that has no relationship with us. We belong to the same planet, and I hope that when people watch this film, they understand that there is no difference between an American kid and a Sudanese kid. And we all belong to the same creative process. We should understand that as people, because in the storytelling of the media of the powerful people, it is done to try to make us feel we are far away from each other and have no empathy. And I hope with this film, I can create in the heart of everyone who can see it, this empathy that I have every day, when I walk on any street, when I see someone who is homeless, I feel like he shouldn’t be sleeping in the streets. We need to share the good. We need to share the wealth.
Are there any women who make films that inspire you, or other movies made by women that you think readers should seek out?
First of all, I would say that for me, being a woman was always an advantage when I was shooting the movie. First of all, because the bad people don’t take you seriously. So, for example, the military sees a woman alone with a camera, and they just feel bad for you. And at the end, even when I got arrested because I was a woman, it always ended in a good place. So it was really helpful. As a woman, you can enter everywhere and have a very intimate relationship with men, women, and children. I don’t know, but doors open more easily when you’re a woman.
To answer your question, I admire many women directors. The first names that come to my mind are Ava DuVernay and Angelina Jolie. I will tell you why, because Angelina Jolie, what I love about her is that she also talks about untold stories. And for example, when she did the movie “In the Land of Blood and Honey” about a Bosnian woman being raped in Bosnia. This is a story that was untold, and that is so important, about the racism against Muslim women, especially in Europe, and especially in my country, France. I have this dream of a world where we can live together. Because I, for example, love Femen, the women who do topless demonstrations. But I also think if a woman wants to be veiled or wear a Burkini, nobody should bother her, and that we should be in a world where everyone who is a woman is free to do with her body what she wants. Unfortunately, there are always people who tell women that bikinis should be forbidden. You also have the Islamist people who are trying to control the body of the woman in different ways. I love that she made that movie, which can help us see Muslim women in a beautiful light. And also, when she won the Oscar for “Girl, Interrupted,” she said, “I could have been born in Afghanistan. I could have been born in Sudan.” She went to Sudan twenty years ago to visit a refugee camp with women who were raped, because there was mass rape in Darfur, and it’s happening again right now. She consistently dedicates her time to these important causes, which is why I have such admiration for her. And with Ava DuVernay, I think it’s so important to have all these untold stories about Black American history. She’s a Black woman doing movies, and they are really big, and she became big and is now at the level where she can inspire a lot of other women of color, and also just women directors around the world.
Additionally, my favorite film of the year was directed by Brittany Shyne. The movie is called “Seeds.” It’s my favorite movie of the year, and I would also like to say something about the incredible director, because it’s a movie made with love, and I cried so much while watching it. It’s such a strong story about people in New Orleans, centering on Black people, countryside people, who have this ancestry of enslaved people working in the cotton fields, and today they own these same fields, but they are not treated equally by the government.
It touched my heart so much because I think we need more films like that. Because you can’t imagine how many American friends I have who still have this vision that all Black Americans don’t want to work. They rely on the state for help, but they don’t take any action. And it’s such a big lie, you know? This film can completely change your perspective on America, being Black in America, and the ongoing inequality that persists. I think America continues silently. There are a lot of propaganda stories. We always see Black people as gang members and drug dealers. I filmed a report for French TV about the Fight for $15, when people were fighting to establish a $15 minimum living wage. So, I went to Chicago, and I was in the suburbs of Chicago, which are very poor, and people were engaging in community organizing. These places where nobody goes, because there are drugs, but 99% of the people there are not drug dealers. They’re just like, having three jobs and working so hard to send their children to school. I met incredible people at that time.
