Interviews

‘Cotton Queen’ Director Suzannah Mirghani Is Telling Sudanese Stories With Care

BYMeriem Belhiba

December 4, 2025

Suzannah Mirghani arrived at the inaugural Doha Film Festival with a film that already carried the weight of a journey. Cotton Queen screened to full rooms and eventually won the festival’s International Feature Film Competition Audience Award, but the filmmaker said the most emotional moment was simply sitting beside her cast. When the film premiered in Venice, most of them could not attend because they could not travel. In Doha they finally watched it together. She told MILLE that it almost felt like the real world premiere. She said it felt like the beginning.

Cotton Queen is rooted in memories that never left her. She grew up in Sudan until her teens and remembers her grandmother, the cotton fields belonging to extended family, the landscape she once walked as a child. She explained that the film comes from “memories of my grandmother, memories of going to the cotton fields, memories of growing up, memories of writing poetry.” Those memories became the foundation of the story. As she researched cotton’s political and colonial history, another layer emerged. Cotton Queen became a fairy tale on the surface and a story about power underneath.

Mirghani places the cotton-queen competition at the heart of the film because it belongs to the world she grew up hearing about — a ritual remembered across Sudanese and Egyptian communities during the early to mid-20th century, where young girls from cotton-farming areas would be selected in celebrations tied to the harvest. She did not treat it as nostalgia but as a narrative lens: a way to show how a young girl becomes the center of forces larger than her, whether family expectations, colonial legacies, or economic pressures. By placing Nafisa at the center of that tradition, she turns something inherited into a story about choice, awareness, and agency.

Many of the film’s most grounded moments come from the actors shaping the language themselves. One actor from a cotton-producing region read the script and told her a specific word would never be used there. She welcomed the change. With veteran actress Mama Rabha, she handed over the scene entirely and asked her to say it the way women of her generation would. “The old generation have their own words,” she said, noting that some differences were generational and some regional. These small corrections became a quiet act of preservation.

The film’s production was shaped by displacement. Mirghani wanted to shoot in Sudan, but the war made it impossible. The team moved to Egypt and built the world of the film there. She is clear about the difficulty. “Right now the biggest challenge is the war. How do we reflect Sudanese realities if we’re not in Sudan?” She said she would rather be shooting on Sudanese soil with Sudanese surroundings because it changes the heart of the film. Yet she built a version of home with what she had and let the actors carry the memories they grew up with.

She sees her first feature movie as part of a much larger absence. “We don’t have enough films from Sudan. We don’t have enough representations of Sudanese identities on screen. We don’t have a film industry,” she said. “Any Sudanese film is a miracle.”

El Sit, her earlier short, was her way of testing if filmmaking was possible in Sudan at all. It did well and brought the resources that made her first feature film possible. But the war shifted the path again. “The plan was always to return to Sudan,” she said, “but because of the war we went to Egypt.”

When she speaks about the story itself, she circles back to the girl at its center. She believes people underestimate young Sudanese girls and the limited power they are given inside the family hierarchy. “In the chain of family power, the girl is always at the bottom.” Nafisa observes everything. She carries innocence and defiance in the same breath. Mirghani wanted to show that a girl can make choices even when the world around her insists she cannot.

Her artistic influences extend beyond Sudan. She mentions magical realism from South America. She brings up The Night of the Hunter and its river scene. She talks about Alice Rohrwacher’s work in rural landscapes and natural light. And she names Al Tayeb Salih as a Sudanese influence whose stories inhabit similar environments but usually revolve around men. She wanted to take that familiar world and turn it toward the perspective of women and girls.

When asked what advice she would give Arab women who want to enter filmmaking, she answers without hesitation. “You have to persevere. You have to keep going,” she said. She went on to explain that the moment a filmmaker steps out of the network — whether of festivals, crews or producers — it becomes very hard to return. The only path forward is to stay in motion. “You have to write. You have to submit.”

Cotton Queen was made under circumstances that would have halted most productions. The war pushed the team out of Sudan. The cast was scattered across borders. The film had to recreate Sudanese life in Egypt while staying loyal to the dialects, gestures, and memories Mirghani grew up with. “How do we reflect Sudanese realities if we’re not in Sudan?” she asked again. Yet she made the film anyway, and the applause in Doha reflected that persistence. The audience was not only responding to the story on screen. They were responding to the determination it took to bring a Sudanese film into the world at a time when Sudan itself is living through rupture.

‘Cotton Queen’ Director Suzannah Mirghani Is Telling Sudanese Stories With Care

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‘Cotton Queen’ Director Suzannah Mirghani Is Telling Sudanese Stories With Care

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