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PHOTOGRAPHY Courtesy of Sudan, Remember Us
“The heroes’ blood is my blood.”
These are the words graffitied on a light turquoise shipping container in the opening shot of Sudan, Remember Us, a 2023 documentary by Hind Meddeb. The camera lingers here for a moment, with only the sound of trees rustling in the background. Then, Hind’s voice: “Maha, Shajan; I am thinking of you trapped in Khartoum”.
Following the fall of Omar al-Bashir in the spring of 2019, the French-Tunisian filmmaker was in Sudan’s capital, where a long-awaited uprising had poured out into the streets. Students and workers across the city were demanding political reform after decades of military dictatorship, and an onslaught of violence from the Transitional Military Council (TMC) after their successful coup d’état.
Five minutes into the film, the camera is weaving through a crowd of thousands; a sit-in that had taken root outside of army headquarters in the early days of June. Music blares from the speakers of cars. Horns and whistles blow, as people make drums of pots and pans. “I won’t go home,” they chant. “I want my rights! Let’s build a citizens’ government, justice for students killed by the old regime.”
Painters decorate empty surfaces with bright and colourful murals. Poets and musicians take to a makeshift stage, performing into the night, while members of the assembly share food and tea; an improvised Iftar in the final days of Ramadan.
The energy is palpable; so much so that you almost feel the heat of the Khartoum night air clinging to the skin as you watch. Not the familiar stifling, but a tangible pulsating of hope and enlivened spirits.
Within the sit-in was also a library, built and stocked by the protesters themselves, where anyone was free to sit and read the donations. Hind had brought some of her father’s books with her to add to the collection. Her father, Abdelwahab, was a Tunisian poet who spent much of his life translating the work of fellow writers, from 12th-century Saigyo to modern Arab literature.
He was one of the first people to publish a French translation of the novel Season of Migration to the North (1966) by the late Tayeb Salih, a Sudanese author and poet now considered to be one of the 20th century’s most prominent Arab writers. “This book is about being in exile in the West. My father, who as a Tunisian living in Paris was also exiled in the West, identified himself with Tayeb Salih. They met, and they became friends.”
Abdelwahab’s translations were among the many turned to ash on the evening of the Khartoum Massacre.
On the 3rd of June 2019, TMC security forces descended on the sit-in. They murdered over 100 protestors. They threw their bodies in the Nile. But before the brutal killings, “the first thing the military did was set fire to the library,” Hind recounts one February afternoon over WhatsApp. “For me, the feeling I had that day was that my father was there with us.”
The first thing the military did was set fire to the library. For me, the feeling I had that day was that my father was there with us.
Hind Meddeb
It’s no accident that the library was the first place targeted by military forces. The Nazi’s used culture-shifting books on gender as bonfire kindling in 1933. The IDF have decimated hundreds of years of Palestinian literature by reducing libraries in Gaza to rubble. Political scientists like Laurence W. Britt have long observed that censorship and the destruction of arts and culture are hallmark pillars of fascism. To control a people, you burn their archives, remove their access to knowledge and restrict their ability to tell their own stories.
And yet, these tactics have never been enough to truly destroy resistance. Time and time again, the human instinct to express and create has proven itself a powerful adversary to fascism. What regimes can never manage to destroy is what people carry in their bodies: voice and memory. That archive that cannot be torched.
Sudan, Remember Us is, among many things, a film reminding us of this power. About the power of community and the enduring spirit of creation. About how friendship and art can sow seeds of liberation that will continue to bloom long after we are gone.
“I didn’t go to cover a war or a revolution as a journalist,” Hind tells me pointedly. “I did it because I wanted to visit the country of my friends – and then it became a film.”
The way in which Sudan, Remember Us came to be is, as she describes, a happenstance born from an act of support. In the days before travelling to Khartoum, she had just premiered Paris Stalingrad, another documentary that follows a young Sudanese poet from Darfur named Suleiman. His words become the voiceover for the film.
“In my neighbourhood, there were like 4,000 people sleeping in the streets next to the Metro Stalingrad; this is near where people apply for asylum. Every two or three days, the police would come and destroy the camps, destroying everything, taking their luggage, throwing it in the garbage, arresting people. It was a nightmare.”
The area around Stalingrad station is known for its encampments, where many Sudanese and Afghan refugees sleep on the streets while awaiting asylum. From 2016 – 2019, Hind helped translate French from Arabic for non-French-speaking applicants and hosted people in her home. She engaged with her neighbours and formed close relationships with political refugees, like Suleiman.
In those three years, Hind also came armed with her camera. “The violence of what we were seeing on a daily basis was so terrible, and not in the news, so I used the camera as a weapon – to tell the story of these people in a way it was never told on French TV.”
Whilst at the Cinéma du Réel festival, where Paris Stalingrad was being presented, Hind was keeping up with the revolution via social media, as had her community back home. ‘My Sudanese friends told me, “Hind, you filmed us sleeping on the ground in Paris. Now you have to go see our country and understand where we come from.”’
While French Immigration was processing their papers, many of Hind’s Sudanese friends were restricted from leaving the country. Instead, they asked her to travel to Khartoum on their behalf and “bring back images of their revolution.”
The violence of what we were seeing on a daily basis was so terrible, and not in the news, so I used the camera as a weapon – to tell the story of these people in a way it was never told on French TV.
Hind Meddeb
And so she went. Not to create a film, but to bear witness to the joy and grief of a country’s struggle for freedom as an obligation to a friend. As Hind says, Sudan, Remember Us is not a journalistic documentation of a crisis from outside; it is a love letter written from within.
Something the film emphasises from the outset is the rich, beautiful texture of the 2019 revolution; what it felt, looked and sounded like. The bonds of a community united over a common goal: liberation for all in their country.
“I wanted the audience to feel the Sudanese people; to feel the love and beauty of their culture, not just get a geopolitical explanation.”
Shajan, one of the film’s protagonists and a student at the time, brings home the importance of his connection while we speak: “We dealt with everything first through love and peace, and through our longing for the homeland we dream of… We went out for it, and some of us died for it.”
This deep-seated passion felt by the protestors is inextricably linked to a celebration of culture throughout Sudan, Remember Us. Among the rising chorus of revolutionaries are poets and rappers, of whom the line between the two blurs.
We dealt with everything first through love and peace, and through our longing for the homeland we dream of… We went out for it, and some of us died for it.
Shajan
In one of the film’s most electric scenes, a young woman stands in a circle of protestors and recites a poem with fearless indignation. The crowd don’t just watch; they become part of the performance. As her sermon flows, they punctuate each verse with a single word: revolution.
In this act, her performance transforms into an ancient practice, taking on the architecture of a Greek tragedy; her voice sets the scene, and the chorus responds. “Oh mother do not weep / Revolution! / Let the homeland weep… Oh father do not weep / Revolution! / Let the homeland weep… You in your pickup / Revolution! / Waving your kalashnikov / Revolution! / Oh brother, my mother’s son / Revolution! / You understand my woe.”
The perspective turns from her mother, to her father, and then to the man with the Kalashnikov – her brother, who has been radicalised into violence against his own by the oppressive military state. She builds a layered, multifaceted portrait of what this moment of political upheaval means, and the lives at stake that are worth fighting for.
This form of expression reveals the politics of the revolution; it is collective by design. The story requires other actors to be complete and cannot fully exist in isolation. It is the act of communion that underscores the whole film.
Throughout the documentary, Hind rejects the standard documentary voiceover; authoritative, distanced and cold. She swaps this in favour of something intimate, lyrical and poetic. Her voiceover addresses the film’s subjects directly, as opposed to the onlooking viewer. “I too began to dream with you,” Hind says in a scene depicting the sit-in. We, as the audience, are invited to be present and to empathise beyond observation.
Poetry, rap and spoken word are anti-colonial practices that run deep into the country’s history. To understand why they were so central to the Khartoum sit-in, you have to understand that in Sudan, written and oral traditions have always been a vital part of existence.
The modern landscape of political poetry in Sudan wouldn’t be where it is today without writer Salah Ahmed Ibrahim, whose 1963 collection Forest of Ebony brought together ideas of Black African identity, anti-colonial messaging, and the perspective that Sudan belonged to the African continent rather than to a constructed Arab world.
Writing in the years following Sudan’s independence in 1956, Ibrahim strongly opposed the cultural erasure explicit in Arabization: the colonial logic inherited by England and Egypt that insisted Sudan’s future required a subordination of its own deep, plural identity.
The work of these poets is an integral part of Sudan’s resistance, informing its politics and becoming a foundational form of its expression.
Decades later, Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi continued this tradition. His most famous collection of poems, A Monkey at the Window (2016), is an intimate and metaphysical illustration of the Sudanese spirit of creativity; it travels, survives borders and refuses its own containment.
Fast forward to Safia Elhilo, a contemporary Sudanese-American poet whose debut, The January Children (2017), takes its title from a tradition of naming children born in the year of a colonial census; the year the state counted and categorised them. In her work, language, identity, and survival are inseparable. Her second collection, Girls That Never Die (2022), grapples with Muslim girlhood, shame, and the weight of being a child of refugees.
The work of these poets is an integral part of Sudan’s resistance, informing its politics and becoming a foundational form of its expression.
Highlighted by protestors throughout Sudan, Remember Us is the understanding of their oppression within the framework of global anti-Blackness. Sudan was once a much larger country that extended further south. Following a referendum on July 9, 2011, South Sudan gained its independence from the north and became the world’s youngest country.
The British-Egyptian governing power during the mid-20th century were the first to make a distinction between the ethnic groups in the north and south. Writers from Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF 2014) have highlighted how Britain favoured, funded and developed the Arab dominant regions of the country to the detriment of Sudan’s Black population. Moreover, authorities from the south felt deeply underrepresented in the country’s political capital of Khartoum. Compounded with the suppression of protests in the south, this purposeful, systemic facilitation of an ethnic divide led to the first of two lengthy and brutal civil wars.
The first civil war began in 1955 and ended in 1972, claiming an estimated 500,000 lives. Despite the introduction of a ceasefire following the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement, tensions mounted ever more between soldiers of the north and rebels from the south until the second Sudanese civil war erupted, stretching from 1983 to 2005. Global Conflict Tracker suggests that the second civil war totalled one of the highest rates of civilian casualties in modern global history, with 2,000,000 deaths and 4,000,000 displaced.
As a South Sudanese woman who emigrated to Britain as a baby in 1999, my own life has been deeply affected by the pain my homeland has experienced. Growing up, my parents would share stories of being separated from their families for months or years on end. They described the terror they felt watching their homes and villages set alight by soldiers. They told me about the two grandfathers I’d never meet, and the three brothers who came before me, all taken by famine.
“It’s deeply rooted in Arab culture to consider Black people as slaves.” Hind does not flinch or falter when making this statement. The poignant fact is that the Western invention of white supremacy permeates every corner of the world. “White supremacy isn’t only in Europe, it’s in Arab countries too. Right now in Darfur, the militia are killing people because they are African. In El Fashir they killed 60,000 people in three days.”
First-hand accounts from Sudanese refugees reported by The Guardian in 2025 lay bare the horrific details of the ongoing and purposeful genocide of Black Sudanese in the country, perpetrated by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia group. From the 1950s until today, a cyclical pattern of racism and anti-Blackness has ravaged the country and violently subjugated its indigenous African population. The young people of Sudan, Remember Us keep this knowledge central to their politics. Their understanding of the state as a divisive power – with the desire to sever any cross-cultural connection – is part of what drives them to be even more radical in their acts of support.
“Every neighbourhood has what is called ‘resistance committees’,” Shajan tells me. “These committees agree on the march routes and locations, raise awareness among the revolutionaries regarding personal safety and maintaining non-violence… There are initiatives for free medical treatment and psychological support for the injured, regardless of the type of injury.”
People are powerful when they come together as a collective. But, beyond the strength found in numbers, these protestors in Khartoum continue to hold power by building strategic networks of mutual aid. The support, whether financial or pastoral, is not restricted to a few individuals; it is offered to all and baked into their organising framework. The final scene of Sudan, Remember Us takes us to the Nile. A pair of thin wooden canoes sit atop the shimmering water, one being paddled by a lone young man. Words recited by poet and engineer Maad Shaikoun fill the audio waves as he tells the tale of a fallen revolutionary, speaking from the afterlife; his final wishes to his comrades and his hopes for the future of his beloved country:
I miss my friends
But we are bound by a promise
We’ve made an agreement
Remember me when victory comes
Remember me when you rebuild the country
Remember me when you plant a tree
When it bears sweet fruit for you
You’ll know I’m the embers that never die out
As clear as a star in broad daylight
I’ve driven out my fears
I extinguished them
Like a flood I came
Like a tornado
And I drew my dreams on the wall
Memorise
What I left on the wall.
Hind reveals that the words of Shaikhoun are what inspired the title, Sudan, Remember Us. “We don’t want them to have died for nothing; what they did is for the future. Even if the revolution didn’t succeed this time, it will the next time.”
Muzamil, a painter whose murals appear throughout Sudan, Remember Us, is now living safely in Holland. Maha – a jewellery maker and the first person Hind met at the sit-in – fled when the RSF occupied her home in Khartoum, and is now in Kampala. Shajan attended the film’s screenings in Venice, Marrakech, and Doha, and is now seeking asylum in Norway while writing a book about her story.
“We are a turning point in the history of Sudan; Sudan will never be the same after this,” she tells me. “We gathered together and sang songs that told our story, narrating our wounds, our hopes, our disappointments, our prayers, and our pain. They told how we remained peaceful and nonviolent while facing an unjust regime… These murals are part of preserving our history.”
The characters of the film are still alive, still moving and making. The revolution’s creative energy did not begin or end at the sit-in; it was part of an ancestral lineage, a stronghold passed down from generation to generation that has followed its descendants into exile, new countries and new creative forms.
You don’t need to be a politician to be political. When humanity is denied, art is the way to reclaim it.
Hind Meddeb
Oral traditions like poetry, spoken word, and rap are modalities of survival. When your written archive is destroyed, or your immigration status means you can’t go home, you carry what matters in your voice, through your story. You pass it to the next person. You freestyle it in a crowd and let thousands join you on your journey.
Community, cemented by authentic creative expression, is the cornerstone of what it means to be a human being. No just society can thrive without it, and the beast of capitalism knows this. Community and creativity are the things that all authoritarian regimes will try to steal from us; the desire to create alongside each other.
As the call comes to a close with Hind, she makes a final declaration: ‘You don’t need to be a politician to be political. When humanity is denied, art is the way to reclaim it.’
So go make something and share it with someone. Do it right now. Create with the knowledge of what is happening in Sudan, and in Gaza and Congo, in every place where power is trying to convince people that their lives, their languages and their libraries don’t matter. Do it as an act of solidarity, and make making a priority in your life. Creating is the most human thing you can do, and therefore, the most powerful tool you have.
You can watch Sudan, Remember Us on Watermelon Plus.
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