Award-winning Sudanese filmmaker Suzannah Mirghani explores colonialism, the impacts of extraction economies, complicated familial love, and the lives of Sudanese women in her fantastic debut feature film Cotton Queen, which won Best Film at the Thessaloniki Film Festival.

Set in a fictional cotton-farming village in Sudan, teenager Nafisa is torn between tradition and change, as the future of her village is tangled up with its colonial past.

Mirghani effortlessly showcases this coming-of-age drama through beautiful girl friendships, community ties, sun-kissed cotton fields, a powerful matriarch with a mysterious past and the mystical waters of the Nile, giving an almost dream-like, ethereal quality to the film.

I sat down with Suzannah to learn more about the film and her inspiration behind it.

How did you come up with the idea for Cotton Queen?

This idea has been percolating for a long time. I grew up in Sudan, and left with my family when I was about 16. My memories of Sudan are nostalgic and a child’s memory of a place.

Any time I tell a story about Sudan, there’s a lot of imagination that has to fill in the gaps for the real memories.

I like to think of Sudan as a magical, mystical place. Add to that the cotton fields where my extended family have cotton farms, which we visited during holidays. All these memories kind of never let me go.

When I decided to write my first film about Sudan, it was essentially a short proof of concept called Al Sit, which I did in 2020 in preparation for this feature. I made it in Sudan at a very beautiful time, just after the revolution in 2019. It was a very welcoming place, very different from the politically authoritarian space that others experienced before that. 

The film comes from many strands that I kind of pulled together, mostly from my childhood memories of my grandmother. I also wanted to underline all of that with the real history of Sudan and its cotton fields, which is not nostalgic or magical or beautiful; especially the British colonial history, which is quite violent and has a very dark side. So I tried to put those two elements together.

The film looks at the colonial exploitation of Sudan’s cotton and how it almost parallels current genetically modified cotton and the impact it has on the environment. Why did you choose the cotton industry as the lens through which to explore Sudan’s history and future?

Cotton has been the backbone of the Sudanese economy since British colonial rule. Before that, Sudanese people had a very intimate relationship with cotton, growing it on smallholder farms for their own use, making clothes and bedding, trading locally, and using the seeds for animal feed. Women especially had a close relationship with cotton, using raw cotton for periods, for example.

When the British arrived at the turn of the century, they were looking for agricultural land, particularly in the fertile Al Jazeera region of Sudan. After experimenting with different crops such as tobacco, etc., they saw how well cotton grew in the Nile Jazeera region and decided it was the most valuable, pound for pound.

It became an extraction economy, where despite establishing one of the world’s largest irrigation projects in Sudan in 1925, the Sudanese people saw very little benefit, as all the profits were extracted away to the empire for gains. Cotton has a long history in Sudan, going back to the pharaohs, but its mechanisation and industrialisation are only just over a hundred years old.

I thought cotton was the perfect symbol, because in and of itself, it’s a very delicate and innocent crop, just like our protagonist, who finds herself surrounded by all these violent and patriarchal forces.

The film has such a dreamlike, almost magical-realist quality to it. What made you want to tell the story in this way?

It was important for me because it’s from my childhood memory; I like to call it a political fairy tale. It has both elements: my kind of naive, poetic, romantic memories, and at the same time, the harsh reality of that world.

Magical realism is another way of imagining a Sudan that is more equitable and treats women better. It’s about imagining a better place, because Sudan is going through very tough times with an ongoing war since 2023, and the magical realism is to kind of lift us out of this horrible reality. 

You have written and directed the film. Did you change anything about the story once you began directing it?

In terms of production, everything changed because we had to move production from Sudan to Egypt due to the war. The story itself did not change. I don’t take the script as gospel, but what I like to do is improvise with the actors. I give them the scenario and ask them to express it in their own words. I don’t think I would know how to speak like a grandmother as well as she can. So sometimes I would ask, “Is this something you would say?” And she would say, “No, I might say…” 

So there was a lot of improvisation with the script itself, but the story remained the same, even though everything behind the scenes was very different.

I loved the moments where we see the girls together, singing, talking, laughing, and just being themselves. How much have your own experiences influenced these women-centred, safe spaces that were depicted in the film?

Yes, the company of girls and that girlhood and adolescent period is really a space where you feel the most free, especially in nature. When it comes to the Nile and the fields, it’s really about getting away from the prying eyes of adults, away from this industry world, the political world, and where you can really be yourself amongst your peers.

Which is why we added that genre of girl songs. The film opens with the girls singing. In Sudan, there’s a genre called Aghani al-Banat, أغاني البنات, which literally means “girl songs”. This is where girls freely express themselves and really push the envelope in terms of what they’re allowed to say. They can talk about very taboo things, especially when it comes to love, boys and bodies – just things that you would never be able to say at home.

The freedom found in nature and through expression can only really happen in groups of girls and with your peers.

We often think of patriarchy as something imposed on women by men, but in the film, Al-Sit is a powerful matriarch who is imposing these ideas that restrict her granddaughter. Why do you think that happens?

I think power is power. It doesn’t matter who is wielding that power to control somebody’s life, whether it’s a man or a woman. We understand it as patriarchy, as historically this is what has happened between the genders.

In Sudanese households, the matriarch is very powerful. A lot of people don’t know that we have a strong culture and long history of matriarchy in Sudan. Historically, we had pharaoh queens who used to rule either on their own or alongside their husbands and sons.

More recently, the grandmother figure is the most respected in the household, even more respected than the grandfather. And she controls the lives of women within the household. So even though Sudan is a patriarchal country on a macro level in terms of governance and economics, on a micro level, the grandmother rules.

There is usually a fine line between being caring and being cruel.

It’s like, how much do you actually protect someone until you suffocate them? These are the kind of questions that I play with in the film: what are the limits of protection, and when does love turn into something else? We see that really playing out in the grandmother character, who for me is the most complex character of all.

Do you see Al-Sit and Nafisa as repeating some of the same struggles that came before them, or is Nafisa breaking that cycle in some way?

In a way, they are mirrored with each other, but I think every repetition is different. Al-Sit had to battle British colonialism and a foreign force taking over the country. Nafisa has to do the exact same thing, but in a different context, which is also from a foreign force bringing genetically modified seeds, but with a Sudanese face.

It’s another kind of neo-colonial extraction in the country, just presented differently. So her reaction will also be different. It’s still a struggle, but it’s a struggle in another context.

I think it’s up to Nafisa now to break free from both bad traditions. You know, we respect our elders, and we respect our culture, but there are some things that we don’t tolerate anymore. And one of those things is circumcision. So this is something that the young generation of Sudanese people are speaking out against for the first time, on the whole. This is something that is changing, and it’s an ancient culture that is hopefully coming to an end.  

You’ve woven a lot of bigger themes into Nafisa’s story, such as colonial exploitation, environmental damage, FGM, etc., but the film never feels preachy or like a history lesson. How did you balance all of that while keeping her personal journey at the heart of the story?

I think the worst thing that you can do is lecture. And I really don’t like the kind of stories that try to teach. I wanted to showcase a story and say, here is a story, here is a girl, here is what she’s going through. And if you can emotionally connect with what she’s going through, that is already a lesson learned; you’re already siding with her. 

I think these issues come up naturally through the story and through emoting with Nafisa. If you feel for her, and you feel that she is a victim of circumcision, or you feel that she’s a victim of her circumstance, and you root for her to stand up against these things, I think you’re already kind of walking with her in that path. 

There’s a lot of love between the women in this film, even when they disagree. What did you want to capture about the relationships between grandmothers, mothers and daughters?

That’s every family; it’s messy, it’s thorny, and there’s a lot of conflict, but you know that you’re always tied together and that this is not going to break apart in that sense. I wanted to show the kind of love between all of these women, but also the conflict that can arise because they don’t see eye to eye, and they don’t always agree. So it’s just presenting a family as it is. 

What were some of the challenges of creating a Sudanese village in Egypt, and what was that experience like for the cast and crew?

It was quite a difficult shoot for multiple reasons. Picking up an entire production and moving it to another country where I had never shot before was already tough. But production problems were the least of my worries because these things might require time and money, but they can be solved.

The hardest part for me was the emotional toll the war had on everyone.

Most of the Sudanese cast and crew were displaced, some had lost family members, and they had seen a lot of horrors during the war. So there was a lot of emotional and psychological trauma to deal with. But for us Sudanese people, community is a great healer. Even though I wanted to wait for the war to be over to shoot in Sudan, the cast and crew were eager to create something together, and encouraged me to go ahead and just do the film, which I think worked out very well for us.

At the time, people weren’t working, they weren’t earning and didn’t really have a direction. And so Cotton Queen became our joint project, something positive that we could build and create together.

We built a Sudanese village in Egypt, and sometimes even fooled ourselves into thinking we were in Sudan. Then you would step off the set and realise you weren’t actually in Sudan, and that could be emotionally taxing.

There was one scene where we had to shoot a wedding with lots of extras, and people really let their hair down. They were singing and dancing, and it became a real celebration. At one point, I was going around with a loudspeaker saying, “Cut, Cut!” but nobody would stop. They just kept dancing, so I just gave up.

I thought, this is the one time we’re celebrating. We’re feeling happy, even though everything else is falling apart around us in Sudan. It was a really magical moment. So I let the scene go on for a long time, and they loved it.

What do you hope the audiences take away from Nafisa’s story?

For me, it’s about representing Sudanese women, especially a young Sudanese girl who is going to be the future of Sudan. I don’t think there is enough representation, especially in fiction. We don’t see a lot of diversity in Sudanese women, or the struggles that they go through, and we have very few fiction films. We don’t really have an industry either, and a lot of people I speak to sometimes have never seen a Sudanese film.

So for me, putting Sudan on screen is a win as well as giving voices to the diversity, struggles, joys and everything in between for Sudanese women. 

I’m sure you did a lot of research when you were making the film, especially around the cotton and textile industry. Clothing is one of the most ancient traditions, because people have obviously been making clothes since the beginning of time. Is there any reading that you would recommend for someone who wants to learn more about this?

The history of cotton is so vast that there are tons of materials, but there is one book called Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert. It is a very good book that connects the world through cotton, not just one industry. The author makes connections all over the world between cotton industries and usually colonialism, because it’s the same culprits every time.

I would also recommend reading up on historical facts about the Cotton Queen competition, which is where this title comes from. I remember when I was doing my research on cotton, I came across a very brief mention of the Cotton Queen beauty competition, and my mind was blown.

It turns out that it was a beauty competition that the British started in the 1930s, in the mills of Northern England, like Manchester, Lancashire and Burnley, etc., as a publicity stunt to promote cotton by choosing the prettiest girl every year amongst the ones working in those factories. 

These British girls were actually handling Sudanese cotton that was extracted from Sudan without realising the connection between them and Sudanese girls who were picking it from the fields. I started asking around if we had Cotton Queen competitions in Sudan. We don’t have headlines or documents, but we do have stories and oral histories.

Some people, especially the older people, can vaguely remember it. 

For me, it was really important to capture that story not just for British girls, but for Sudanese girls who don’t get the headlines or the recognition.

I wanted to reclaim that title for them and to talk about queens as people with real power, not just beauty queens. For me, these two words, Cotton Queen, really captured everything that I wanted to say in this film. It has everything: young girls, industry, patriarchy and power. All of those things kind of wrapped up into just two words, Cotton Queen.

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Cotton Queen, presented by T A P E Collective, is on general release from 2nd October. Find a screening near you.