Keswick Film Club - Reviews - Cotton Queen

This week the Film Club screened the first full feature film by a woman from Sudan. The film was ostensibly a tale of three generations of women in a Sudanese village where cotton was the economic basis of life. It was layered by seeing the changing culture of the young women, still held in by the historical beliefs and control by the older generation. The arranged marriage of the daughter with a returning foreigner, or love marriage with a village boy was a theme along with the historical role of the British in cotton. Then there was a theme of the threat of genetically modified crops.

So an interesting multi-layered, multi-generational film portraying village life in Sudan in a gentle, soft lens style. In the end Nafisa, the young girl, states that "I will determine my future".