Join us this Thursday evening at Cheche Books & Coffee for a screening of two short experimental films by Sudanese filmmakers, and a short lecture on how Sudanese artists engage the archive to build experimental approaches to culture and storytelling.
Films
Dead as a Dodo (2022) | dir. Leena Habiballa
Revolution Fever Dreams (2019) | dir. Haneen Sidahmed
Dead As a Dodo (2022) | dir. Leena Habiballa
Dead As A Dodo (2022) lays bare the settler colonial mythology at the heart of the popular narrative of the Dodo’s extinction. By drawing on archival material and the Dodo’s apparition the film performs a sensory haunting, reviving the spaces between life and death that have been shaped by settler violence into a value-forming exercise. This work is inspired by and is in conversation with a book of poems titled A Theory of Birds by the Palestinian-American poet Zaina Alsous.
About Leena Habiballa
Leena Habiballa is a cultural worker with an interest in Sudanese visual/material cultures and community filmmaking/exhibition models. She explores these themes through art/film criticism, research, and her own filmmaking practice. She is currently a member of the artist workers' cooperative not-nowhere and is the winner of the 2023 Michael O'Pray Prize.
Revolution Fever Dreams (2019) | dir. Haneen Sidahmed
Revolution Fever Dreams (2019) is a both a deconstruction and exploration of Sudanese national identity through the lens of collective memory, sentiment, and key political junctures and discourses in Sudanese history. Created amid the elation of the December Revolution, the piece explores a moment where the idea of nationhood is contested - as revolutionaries strive to forge a ‘New Sudan’, away from the postcolonial paradigms and oppressive structures that have colored their world with grief, loss & precarity. Revolution Fever Dreams draws from different conceptions of ‘nation’ as articulated by resistance movements in Darfur, South Sudan, Khartoum, and the diaspora. As the December Revolution propels Sudan into a moment of futurity and possibility, the piece embodies the collective reckoning Sudanese embark with their political past, as well as their hopes, sentiments, and yearnings for an unclear future.
About Haneen Sidahmed
Haneen Sidahmed is a Sudanese-American multimedia artist, storyteller, and archivist based in California. Her archival work and artwork are intimately entwined, both seeking to explore the intricacies and contradictions of diasporic experience. Haneen is a nostalgia-junkie interested in how Sudanese communities rectify diasporic ruptures through collective memory and radical imagination. Her current projects include the Sudan Tapes Archive, an audio digitization project that seeks to build an accessible sonic archive of Sudanese cassette tapes. Her archival work has been featured on GQ Middle East, NTS Radio, and The World. She has exhibited artwork in Oakland, Toronto, & Rotterdam.