Cotton Queen review, mystery, matriarchs and magic in pioneering Sudanese debut

Suzannah Mirghani’s first feature contains a powerful performance by Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud as a village’s elder woman and tackles the long shadow of British imperialism and women’s rights

‘I decide my past,” says a village matriarch in this intriguingly political and poetic drama from Suzannah Mirghani, making her feature debut, and with it becoming the first Sudanese woman to direct a feature. (She was forced to cancel the original shoot in Sudan when war broke out in 2023 , moving production to Egypt.) It’s a film with things to say about the long shadow of the British empire, neocolonialism, women’s rights and female genital mutilation. But it mostly says it all without undermining its sense of mystery and shivers of magic realism.

We’re in present day Sudan , where village elder Al-Sit (Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud) is an iron-willed woman not to be messed with. Everyone knows the story of how as a young girl she ran the British out of town; small children in the village gleefully tell the story of how she slaughtered every single last one of them. Can it possibly be true? The trauma of her past is at the centre of the film, and Mahmoud’s witchy performance, fierce and powerful, is utterly compelling.

Al-Sit is arranging the marriage of her beloved 15-year-old granddaughter Nafisa (Mihad Murtada). But Nafisa’s mother has another husband in mind, businessman Nadir (Hassan Kasala), who is of Sudanese heritage, but grew up abroad. He arrives in the village to flog farmers genetically modified cotton seeds manufactured by a multinational, and there is perhaps a sense here of history repeating itself, international interests trying to control local resources.

Poetry-writing Nafisa is appalled by both husband options. She has a teenage crush on a sweet kid who grows onions. But while fault lines are set for a showdown, the film is not really about who she should marry, but her ability to shape her own future. It’s not perfect, and its tonal shifts don’t always work, but you’re unlikely to see another film like it this year.