Cotton Queen: Suzannah Mirghani's Sudanese story of women, cotton and colonialism

Proclaimed the first Sudanese female filmmaker after her debut feature Cotton Queen premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival’s Critics' Week programme, Suzannah Mirghani disputes the description, saying the fragile Sudanese film industry doesn't keep good track of its history, so there must be other women before her.

Building on her previous short film Al-Sit (2020, available on Netflix Middle East), Cotton Queen won the ArteKino Award at L’Atelier de la Cinéfondation at Cannes in 2022 before heading to Venice, and it celebrates its UK premiere on October 2.

The film follows Nafisa, a teenage girl growing up in a cotton-farming village in Sudan. When a businessman arrives promising to modernise the local cotton industry with genetically engineered seeds and asks for Nafisa’s hand in marriage, she finds herself caught between tradition, modernity, and her own emerging sense of independence.

Cotton Queen draws on Suzannah's childhood memories of Sudan, where she lived until she was a teenager, as well as her later research into the history of cotton and British colonialism in the country.

The original intentions were to shoot in Sudan, with many of the same actors and crew who worked on Al-Sit. But the outbreak of the Sudanese civil war in 2023 forced Mirghani to relocate production to Egypt.

Suzannah Mirghani speaks to The New Arab about making a film rooted in Sudanese memory, the complicated relationship between cotton and colonialism, the country’s interrupted cinematic history, and why she wanted her teenage protagonist to challenge both tradition and modernity.

The New Arab: You have been described as the first female Sudanese feature filmmaker. What does that mean to you?

Suzannah Mirghani: It’s a big, big responsibility. But I always say someone somewhere must have made a feature film; it just didn’t get publicity.

I’m always hesitant to say I’m the first because I truly believe other women have written and directed films, and we simply don’t know about them.

Maybe their work wasn’t properly archived. In Sudan's history, there isn’t a documented female feature filmmaker before me, but women have been writing for television and working in other forms of filmmaking. So I don’t really like to make that claim about myself.

How did Cotton Queen begin? Is it based on real events?

I lived in Sudan until I was a teenager, about the same age as the protagonist. Then my family left, and we moved to Qatar.

My recollections of Sudan are a mixture of memories of my grandmother, life on the cotton farms and my extended family, who had cotton fields. I remember it all as magical, romantic and nostalgic.

But as I got older and read more, I started learning more about Sudan's history, especially the history of cotton. I learned about the dark and violent history of British colonialism.

So the film is really taking two tracks. On the surface, it’s a happy, light-filled, enchanting story. But underneath lurks a very harsh reality. In this regard, Cotton Queen brings my two lives together: my childhood memories and my adult research brain.

What is interesting about the film’s visual language is that the cotton fields usually associated with struggle and exploitation are depicted here beautifully, not necessarily in the context of physical hardship or poverty.

Was that a conscious choice? Absolutely. Whenever we see cotton on screen, especially for audiences around the world, it’s usually associated with the American South, slavery and a horrible history.

In Sudan, yes, we had a violent and horrible history around cotton, but we also had a community relationship with the crop. There was a loving and caring connection between the communities that grew cotton and the cotton itself.

People used cotton directly for their own needs, for clothes and bedding. Women especially had a close relationship with cotton, using raw cotton for menstruation, while grandmothers spun it into thread and turned it into fabric.

We also have a strange situation in some Sudanese rural communities where grandmothers can be financially independent because they make money selling thread, while other household members may be unemployed.

The grandmother in Cotton Queen has enormous authority. What does she represent within Sudanese society?

Sudan has a very strong matriarchal cultural identity, even though the country is extremely patriarchal at the governmental, economic, and macro levels.

It is patriarchal, militaristic and dictatorial. But inside the home, things are very much guided by women, and especially by the grandmother. She can be at the top of the household power structure.

I’m talking about specific rural communities, of course, not every Sudanese grandmother.

In some communities, grandmothers have traditionally had a say in who and when gets married, and other important family decisions.

They also hold tradition and, in some cases, control the income from cotton. Even going back to ancient times, women could rule alongside men. That respect for older women has continued.

I remember very funny situations from my childhood where my grandmother would discipline my father in front of us. We would be dying of laughter because my father was a very patriarchal man, and yet there was this old woman telling him what to do.

But, as I said, that power is usually contained within the household. For me, it was important to ask: what happens when a girl or a woman takes that power beyond the home?

The main character, Nafisa, is at the centre of the film’s conflict between tradition and modernity. What did you want her to represent?

She is part of a new generation that questions everything: tradition, modernity, and their families. But at the same time, they are still trying to hold on to some of those customs.

It’s about picking and choosing what is good rather than simply accepting everything – the good and the bad.

Sudan has beautiful customs, but also harmful ones, such as female circumcision, where Nafisa’s sceptical view on marriage emerges from.

These are things that have to change through action, and the process is very difficult to do in tight, conservative communities.

So, for me, the film is about Nafisa rejecting what is bad and taking what is good from both the modern and traditional worlds.

The film also introduces a new kind of outsider and coloniser – a businessman arriving with genetically modified cotton. How did that storyline emerge?

I came up with it through my research. When I first started writing, I made a proof-of-concept short film in 2020, Al-Sit. At that point, I hadn’t done all the research that I eventually did for the feature.

The short was more about love, poetry, cotton, beauty and nostalgia. I shot it in Sudan and promised everyone I would come back and make a feature. I was telling the children: don’t grow up, stay exactly as you are!

But when I began developing the feature, I started reading much more about genetically modified seeds and their introduction into Sudanese agriculture.

That made me think about another cycle of dependence. Foreign agricultural companies introduce seeds, farmers become dependent on external systems, and the cotton ultimately becomes part of an international economic structure that can leave farmers in a weaker position.

That is where the colonial history of cotton becomes connected to the present, and colonisation actually keeps going.

You initially intended to shoot the feature in Sudan. What happened?

I had always wanted to shoot in Sudan. There was no question about it. The plan was to use the same actors and crew who had worked on Al-Sit. Then the Sudanese civil war began in 2023, and all of those plans were destroyed.

We eventually moved the production to Egypt. It was the practical choice: Arabic-speaking, culturally similar, with cotton fields and the Nile.

But I really didn't want to shoot my first feature anywhere other than Sudan, because it is about the land.

So, I refused at first. I waited for a year, and the war kept getting worse. Meanwhile, the actors had fled Sudan and gone to Egypt.

At a certain point I thought: what am I doing in Sudan on my own? And I inevitably had to take the film to Egypt.

The fact that Cotton Queen is fiction helped me make it in another country. I tried to put a positive twist on the situation: we were recreating Sudan at a time when the country was being destroyed.

I’m still sad about it, to be honest. But you have to make compromises in times of war.

You cast non-professionals and theatre actors rather than established screen actors. How did you find them?

The young actors were doing their first major screen roles, apart from the experience they had with my short film. We auditioned in Sudan because this was originally the same cast as Al-Sit. There were only one or two different characters, but we still held auditions.

The funny thing is that when we auditioned for the young businessman, we had more than 100 candidates. While for Nafisa, the main role, we had only five girls from the whole country.

That tells you something about how families support young girls becoming actors – or rather, how they don’t. They don’t necessarily see acting as a possible future career for their daughters.

For many of them, it is just something fun that they do. They don’t imagine it as a profession.

Within the fragile Sudanese reality you are describing, Sudan has produced several important films in recent years. How come?

We have a very unfortunate history with filmmaking. Every time the industry starts growing, something happens politically that shuts it down. It’s like every decade has a bloom and then a destruction.

The 1960s and 1970s were amazing. Then in the 1980s and 1990s, there was almost nothing because the government outlawed many forms of art and culture.

Then in 2019, we had the revolution, and suddenly the arts became the darling of the country. Music, singing, dancing, filmmaking – everything.

It was only a short period, between 2019 and 2021, but we saw films like You Will Die at Twenty, Talking About Trees and Khartoum Offside. Those films gave us a lot of hope.

When I saw Talking About Trees, I immediately went to Sudan to shoot my short film.

All you need is for someone to tell you that something is possible. We worked with some of the same crew, asked people for information, and shared knowledge. That’s how you grow a community and eventually a film industry.

But now everything has gone back to zero. I do know that some people have returned and are shooting short films, sometimes almost in secret. There is still a desire to make films.

Will Cotton Queen eventually be shown in Sudan?

Right now, the situation is very bad. But even before the war, we didn’t have functioning cinemas in the way you would expect. So, there wasn’t really an obvious place to screen the film.

But I would say that it doesn’t matter where I screen this film in the world. There is a Sudanese audience.

You describe yourself as a Sudanese-Russian filmmaker. What does that identity mean to you?

I grew up in Sudan and never lived in Russia. However, my mother met my father in Russia when Sudanese students were sent to the Soviet Union in the 1970s on scholarships to study there, in Moscow, Rostov, and other cities.

There are thousands of people like me with Russian-Sudanese citizenship in both countries, as well as Russian-Congolese, Russian-Palestinian, and many other communities that emerged from that period. It was part of the Cold War project.

My father has a similar story to Suleiman, one of the character-filmmakers in Talking About Trees. He is a doctor, but he also studied in the Soviet Union.

What the Soviet government probably didn’t anticipate was that all these students would bring Russian wives back home.

Finally, what does the title Cotton Queen stand for?

While researching the film, I came across a brief reference to something called the Cotton Queen beauty competition.

In the 1930s, the British had a beauty competition called the Cotton Queen. It took place in northern England, in places like Manchester and Lancashire, for British women working in cotton mills and turning cotton into thread.

What they didn’t necessarily realise was that the cotton they were working with could have come from Sudan.

Then I discovered that there had also been a Cotton Queen competition in Sudan. But those women never received the same headlines, crowns or publicity.

I learned about it by talking to older people. And immediately I thought: that’s the title of my film.

Those two words capture everything I wanted to say: cotton, industry, colonialism. Both British colonialism and Sudan.

But I also wanted to take the idea of the Cotton Queen away from its original meaning of beauty, girls and a patriarchal industry.

To turn my character into a real queen – a woman with real power.

Mariana Hristova is a freelance film critic, cultural journalist, and programmer. She contributes to national and international outlets and has curated programs for Filmoteca de Catalunya, Arxiu Xènctric, and goEast Wiesbaden, among others. Her professional interests include cinema from the European peripheries and archival and amateur films