Cotton Queen: A Promethean Tale of Female Empowerment Discloses New Perspectives on African Cinema
Confirming its commitment to showcasing the unusual and underrepresented aspects of contemporary cinema, SIC (International Film Critics’ Week) certainly celebrated its 40th anniversary in a blaze of glory, with a selection of seven works—plus three out of competition—defying the boundaries of borders, genders, and genres.
Among the chosen seven, Suzannah Mirghani’s Cotton Queen—a coproduction with an all-Sudanese cast and crew—stands out as a remarkable feat of postcolonial cinema, juxtaposing female body as a commodity in order to retell a parable of emancipation and rebirth, where the spoken word, in the form of poetry and chant, is presented as an antidote to oppression.
Comprising a cast of mostly non-professional actors, Cotton Queen had to be shot in Egypt, where many Sudanese sought refuge in the outbreak of the 2023 civil war, after the brief democratic season that followed the deposition of dictator Omar al-Bashir.
There, in the Northern regions where cotton fields meet the Nile delta, director Mirghani was able to reimagine the Sudan of her childhood memories, as her alter ego Nafisa (Mihad Murtada) embarks on the revealing yet perilous journey of adolescence. Confronted with the authority of grandmother and matriarch Al-Sit (Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud), Nafisa tries to resist the pressure of marriage to a businessman from the capital—who boasts about the introduction of a genetically modified cotton—and to affirm herself as woman freed of past conventions.
In doing so, Nafisa, and Cotton Queen as a whole, performs a double function. First, the film gives a body and a face to a “body” of national cinema that, except for the British actualités from the outset of colonial rule and a handful of works from the 1970s, had not been granted the possibility to develop autonomously. Second, it provides future directions for said national cinema, which is not to be just understood as “in the making,” but as moving alongside the latest trajectories of the Seventh Art.
Specifically, Mirghani entrusts to magical realism the task of signifying Nafisa’s inner world, which has the power to transfigure the natural environment around her. Against the stereotypical and imperialist representations of Africa—misunderstood as a single entity stripped of local specificities, or as a barren land ruled by tribalism and backwardness—Cotton Queen presents white cotton wisps as a symbol of innocence and grace, and harvesting as a ritual punctuated by music and play, exhibiting the joy that arises from communal labor.
Disturbing the perpetuation of this ritual is the interference of the capital, whose adepts deprive locals of the possibility to reimagine reality by imposing the unshakable logic of profit, signified by the GMO cotton monocrop. Thus, the palette of the cinematography, by DOP Frida Marzouk, abruptly turns to the austere colors of the businessman’s suit, and of the robes of the elders, while the nuanced shades of Nafisa’s runs to the river are taken over by the homogenizing light of high noon.
However, threats to Nafisa’s agency over her microcosm are not only external. Within the community, matriarch Al-Sit—the main character of the proof-of-concept short Al-Sit, shot by Mirghani in 2020—embodies the shadow of a contradictory colonial heritage, whose narrative (legend has it that Al-Sit slaughtered the former British masters) ensnares the present in a glorious, fabricated past. Again, the custom of female genital mutilation, administered by Al-Sit, is the bodily equivalent of the genetically engineered cottonseed: an interference within the natural order of things, upheld by a comparably blind logic—that of preserving honor and chastity of the young ones.
Happily, Cotton Queen envisions for Nafisa, as well as for all the women of Sudan, a different future. Just as the heroine literally purifies her community by means of a promethean tongue of flame, bringing the creative power of the spoken word—the “burning” letters of passion addressed to her same-age lover—into the realm of physical matter, Mirghani pictures a generation where knowledge and idealism can break the chains of generational trauma, as well as those of neoliberalism as a form of neocolonial yoke.
In acknowledging this, one cannot help but to be in awe of the evocative power of Cotton Queen, and to look forward to what Sudanese cinema will contribute to the global arthouse cinema scene.
Giovanni Stigliano Messuti
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2025