El Gouna FF 2019: ‘You Will Die at 20’, Winner The Golden Star
Winner of El Gouna Golden Star for Narrative Film (Trophy, certificate, and US $50,000) went to ‘You Will Die at 20’/ ‘Satamout fi aleshrin’ by Amjad Abu Alala.
Very few films come out of Sudan, so it was revealing to see two here in El Gouna: ‘You Will Die at 20’, the debut film made by the young Amjad Abu Alala, and ‘Talking About Trees’, a doc about four veteran filmmakers from Sudan in the 1960s who are still going strong and fighting the good fight in a country torn apart by dictators and wars.
However, although Amjad Abu Alala is a Sudanese filmmaker and screenwriter, he was born and raised in the UAE, where he studied media at the United Arab Emirates University. As a producer and director, he wrote and directed numerous short films that participated in various festivals, including Coffee and Orange (2004), Feathers of the Birds (2005), and Teena (2009). His film Studio (2012) was supervised by Abbas Kiarostami at a workshop Kiarostami himself was conducting. Alala also won the Best Arabic Theatre Script Award from the Arab Authority for Apple Pies (2013). He is currently Head of the Programming Committee at the Sudan Independent Film Festival.
Perhaps it takes one born “in exile”, to represent Sudan today. As the older filmmakers in Talking About Trees, so this younger filmmaker can return now to his country and create a new cinema for today, international (this was produced with Egypt, France, Germany and Norway), universal as in a young man coming of age and taking his fate into his own hands, and particular to his own time and place. Such a talent as Amjad Abu Alala successfully depicts a young man living under the constraints of a small traditional society which is also a society of normal (that is, modern) functioning, as he loves, loses, becomes emotionally award in an environment that is economically secure and safe.
The lifetime of Muzamel, the movie’s protagonist, has been curtailed by the public proclamation made by his village’s religious leader that he will die at twenty. It happened at the ceremony when his parents brought him, their only child, for a blessing. This prophecy is too much for the father who consequently abandons his family. Isn’t that too often the way, the man saying to the woman, “you are strong, you can handle this on your own” when crises threaten the family unit’s well-being? Muzamel grows up with an overprotective mother and never manages to distract attention from the prophecy.
We witness young Muzamel’s destiny, his anxiety about his fate, and his transition into a young man as he struggles to flourish among his classmates in Quran classes by learning the sacred text of Islam by heart, or to affirm his personality in his first love relationship as he tries to find refuge and even salvation.
As the fatal year approaches, he encounters Suliman, an unwelcome figure in the town who has just returned from the city with his mistress who has given up her own preordained “normal” life to be with him. Muzamel’s process of self-questioning begins and he comes to see Suliman as the father he never had. An elderly cinema enthusiast, Suliman introduces the boy to his film projector, camera and movies, a discovery that tears Muzamel from the living cemetery in which he has already been buried and casts him into a paradise, the cinematic glimpses of life beyond which have a huge effect on him.
The story immerses us in an environment which is totally normal and yet totally exotic. Starting with the tribal prophecy and the role of traditional ministrations, we come to feel at home in this new environment in which the same human emotions are displayed as we would see in any society.
In some ways similar to last year’s award-winning Yomeddine from Egypt in that we become emotional participants in an environment we are not a part of but which we come to know as if it were our own, this film takes us on a journey where there are no familiar signposts, where the protagonist, a young man, finds his way, not only surviving but by learning the essentials of coming of age in an age where we are not the ones in control, until we consciously take control of our own destiny.
You Will Die at 20 premiered in Venice where it won the Lion of The Future Luigi De Laurentiis Award for Best Debut Film, and continued on to Toronto and then El Gouna where it won The Golden Star for Narrative Film (trophy, certificate, and US $50,000). Next year it will likely be submitted by Sudan for the nomination for Best International Feature Academy Award.
2019 | 103 min |Arabic, with English Subtitles
DIRECTOR: Amjad Abu Alala
PRODUCERS : Arnaud Dommerc, Hossam Elouan, Ingrid Lill Høgtun, Michael Henrichs
PRODUCTION COMPANIES: Andolfi, Transit Films, DUOFilm AS, Die Gesellschaft DGS
SCREENPLAY: Yousef Ibrahim, Amjad Abu Alala
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Sébastien Goepfert
EDITING: Heba Othman
MUSIC: Amine Bouhafa
SOUND: Rana Eid, Rawad Hobeika, Florent Lavallée
CAST: Mustafa Shehata, Islam Mubarak, Mahmoud Elsaraj, Bunna Khaled, Talal Afifi, Rabeha Mahmoud, Moatasem Rashid, Asjad Mohamed
Print Source: Film Clinic Independent Distribution, jessica.khoury@fcidistribution.com
