With Cotton Queen, Suzannah Mirghani delivers a debut feature that matters in several ways. Not only because it marks the arrival of a new voice in contemporary African cinema, but above all because it puts the director in the history books as one of the very first Sudanese women to direct a fiction feature film. A female gaze that is more than necessary in a landscape where stories about Sudan have long been told by others, often reduced to images of war, famine or political crisis.

Developed from her short film Al-Sit, the film continues this desire to put women back at the centre of the story: their desires, their dreams, their choices and their power. At the heart of the story is Nafisa, played by the very promising Mihad Murtada, a young woman living in a Sudanese village whose economy depends on cotton growing.

Opposite her stands Al-Sit, her grandmother, played by Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud, a respected and feared matriarch who embodies the memory of the village and a form of permanence in the face of outside upheavals.

The heart of the film lies in the relationship between Nafisa, representing a new generation turned towards change, and her grandmother Al-Sit, who watches over the preservation of traditions with an iron hand. The arrival of a man from the city, bearing promises of progress and modernisation, upsets this fragile order.

Shot through with touches of the dreamlike, Cotton Queen keeps a kind of visual lightness that contrasts with the tensions running through the story. Behind the beauty of the light-bathed images, behind the softness of the cotton fields, much deeper subjects surface: the condition of women, the weight of family inheritance, the difficulty of asserting individual freedom in the face of collective pressure.

Moreover, the film offers, between the lines, a political reflection on North/South relations. Cotton Queen reminds us that cotton, grown in the South, continues to feed economic systems dominated by the North, in a logic inherited from colonial exploitation.

For beneath the apparent delicacy of the cotton landscapes lies a larger story: that of a territory where this resource, cotton, continues to stir up the greed of the North.

Through the encounter with the newcomer from the city, Cotton Queen subtly sketches the opposition between two worldviews: that of economic progress, turned outward, and that of an attachment to the land, to rites and to a form of autonomy defended by the matriarch.

Promised profitability and the imperative to adapt, or the preservation of traditions. Mirghani explores the tensions between modernity and heritage but quickly moves beyond the simple conflict between old and new to tackle broader questions: who really benefits from progress? Who owns the resources? Who decides the future of rural communities?

The director refuses simplistic oppositions and instead offers a human, nuanced gaze attentive to the contradictions of each of her characters.

What above all distinguishes the film is its refusal of miserabilism and of fixed representations of Sudan. Sudan is never reduced to a backdrop of suffering. There is no question here of placing women (and men) in a context of conflict or reducing them to mere victims. On the contrary, Suzannah Mirghani chooses to give her characters agency, an inner life, complexity, a voice, a full existence.

Despite this, politics intrudes on art. Indeed, the civil war that has affected Sudan since April 2023 forced the film crew to move the shoot to Egypt. The very conditions of production thus bear witness to the geopolitical realities weighing on the country and recall that artistic creation can never be completely separated from the historical and political context in which it is set.

Cotton Queen charms through the finesse of its writing and the quiet power of its performers. The film draws much of its strength from its cinematography; the colour and sets create a gripping atmosphere, but the performances by Mihad Murtada and Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud are among its greatest assets, especially for a largely inexperienced cast under the direction of a filmmaker making her very first film.

A successful bet for Suzannah Mirghani, who gives us a sensitive and accomplished first feature that opens a new space for female voices in Sudanese cinema.

Cotton Queen will be released in cinemas from early July 2026.