Released 2023

SUNDAY 17 NOVEMBER 2024 – 10.00 am
TUESDAY 19 NOVEMBER 2024 – 8.15 pm
RUNNING TIME 120 minutes

Synopsis: 

Set in Sudan’s recent past, the film tells the story of a fraught friendship between two very different women. In doing so it serves to illuminate the fault lines that divide nations… rich/poor, Muslim/Christian/, north/south, light-skinned/dark…

Review:

With recent conflict in Sudan in mind, one could be forgiven for approaching Mohamed Kordofani‘s Goodbye Julia, which takes place in Khartoum during the six years prior to the 2011 secession of South Sudan, as a worthy, topical history lesson. And it certainly does have merit as a primer for the class, ethnic and religious unrest that besets the troubled state. But what actually transpires is far more engaging, in the vein of Asghar Farhadi, wherein a tight, high-concept moral core unravels into strands of widening, deepening social consequence. Telling the story of a fraught friendship between two very different women, Kordofani’s intelligent, compassionate scripting ensures that the political never overwhelms the personal. Yet it also illuminates just how well the fault lines that divide a nation can map onto the rifts within a human heart divided against itself.

Mona (Eiman Yousif) is a wealthy Muslim from northern Sudan who abandoned her singing career at the behest of her husband Akram (Nazar Gomaa) and lives in a gated house in a well-to-do district. Julia (Siran Riyak) is a poor Christian southerner who, along with her husband Santino (Paulino Victor Bol) and son Daniel (played by Louis Daniel Ding and Stephanos James Peter at different ages), is living in a temporary shanty, having just been unfairly evicted. The women’s paths are not meant to cross — at most, Julia ought to be a peripheral presence, selling bread on the side of the road as Mona drives by. But one day, Mona accidentally strikes little Daniel with her car while driving distractedly through his neglected neighbourhood.

Had she done the right thing and stayed to face the music, likely no further tragedy would have ensued. However, Mona pursues a course of action that leads to devastating consequences. Meanwhile, there is nothing to connect her to the ensuing events except the increasingly loud voice of her conscience.

That voice drives her to offer Julia a job as her live-in housekeeper. The scene is thus set for a melodrama of escalating tension in which Mona’s fragile house of cards, built on dubiously well-meant deceptions, threatens to collapse.

But Kordofani has a more humane story to tell, in which his characters, as beautifully played by two actors mining an easy chemistry, are more than archetypes within a ticking-clock plot. Across the divides of rich and poor, Muslim and Christian, north and south, light-skinned and dark, Mona and Julia become friends. But in a neat parallel with the state of Sudanese society by late 2010, it seems that no matter how closely bonded you might have become to your neighbour, sometimes the weight of a long, cruel history demands separation.

In many ways, this is a valuable film in its portrayal of humanity, friendships, betrayals, hopes and reconciliation. And valuable for taking its audience into Sudan.

Source: www.variety.com. Jessica Kiang 29/5/23 Edited Extracts Accessed 2/9/24