When writer-director Mohamed Kordofani first conceived of the film “Goodbye Julia,” he realized that he didn’t have a single friend from South Sudan — “and there are millions who live in Khartoum.” Now he has hundreds, he tells PvNew. The first Sudanese film to premiere in the Un Certain Regard sidebar in Cannes, his debut feature won the Prix de la Liberté and is now the official Sudanese entry for the Academy Awards, with Lupita Nyong’o on board as an executive producer. The film had its Middle East and North Africa premiere this week at El Gouna Film Festival, where Kordofani was awarded the PvNew MENA Region Talent Award.
Originally trained as an aircraft engineer, Kordofani had an epiphany while working in the Gulf which proved to be the genesis for the film: “My wife was pregnant with my second daughter and we needed a maid. The agency presented us with a photo album of a lot of girls from the Philippines. The girls had numbers, years of experience, and age. There was not even a name, and we just had to choose. It took me back to when I first saw the result of the 2011 referendum, when 99% of the southerners chose secession. I was shocked. It didn’t take me a long time to know that it’s not a political disagreement. This has something to do with our behavior. They are feeling like second-class citizens in their own country. And I remember I felt very complicit in what happened.”
From this came the story of Julia (Siran Riak), the southern Sudanese maid who works for Mona (Eiman Yousif), an Arabic woman in Khartoum who is hiding a secret from Julia. “I wrote a small synopsis but I was scared to talk about such a sensitive topic, because it will get a lot of backlash. Then something happened. The revolution started in Sudan in 2018. And suddenly, the people marched on the streets, they want to change and they are talking about the same thing: coexistence, all the things that I wrote on that small piece of paper. And suddenly, I’m not afraid anymore.”
The progress of several drafts mirrored the evolution of Kordofani’s own thinking. “I’ve always felt like this identity that we tried to impose in Sudan, this Arab Islamic identity, was the root cause of all the problems that we’re having. Because there’s a lot of people who are not Arabs, not Muslims. But, for some reason, we are so proud of being Arabs, so proud of being Muslims, of being men, of being of a certain tribe. And these are things that don’t bring people together. But in the revolution, people were finally calling for values that can actually bring people together. So I started writing.”
Studying for his PhD outside Sudan, he also experienced racism for the first time: “Now I’m the black guy from outside.” This led to him developing the character of Mona, who needs to overcome her own racism and guilt. “I started to put my own struggles into the script. In 2011, I said that I want to stop being racist. It was not an easy thing. You know, you catch yourself with thoughts. It’s not an overnight thing. It’s not a switch that you turn on or off. So it’s a constant. Check yourself, check your thoughts. And sometimes it just happens. The film is part of that conscious, ongoing effort to change.”
The logistics of shooting in Khartoum were challenging to say the least. “We started shooting in November 2022. And this coincided with the one year anniversary of the military coup that overthrew the democratic government that the revolution brought. So you can imagine how many protests were going on, the security forces were blocking the bridges, we could not move from one place to another. Added to this, no electricity, no internet, no transportation, also the sanctions were imposed, so he could not send money through the bank.” Tear gas from nearby protests sometimes drifted into the location.
Kordofani speaks from Los Angeles where he is helping with the Oscar campaign as well as attending community screenings in colleges. “In Harvard, in Yale, in NYU, in Princeton, in Columbia, which is something that I’ve never thought would happen. It’s amazing.”
There is one place where the film has not screened yet. “Unfortunately, we cannot screen right now in Sudan with the current war going on. We’re planning to screen in January, in Juba, the capital of South Sudan.”
The uncertain situation in Sudan paired with the prestige “Goodbye, Julia” has won, Kodafani is adjusting his ambitions accordingly: “I can think bigger and have bigger stories to tell.”
