Hind Meddeb, dir. Sudan, Remember Us ( Soudan, souviens-toi ). 2025. 78 minutes. Arabic with English subtitles. France/Tunisia. Watermelon Pictures. No price reported.

Hind Meddeb, dir.Sudan, Remember Us (Soudan, souviens-toi).2025.78 minutes.Arabic with English subtitles.France/Tunisia.Watermelon Pictures.No price reported.Hind Meddeb's Sudan, Remember Us arrives when Sudan's catastrophe has been rendered largely illegible to international audiences, overshadowed by other wars and filtered through the accounts of the very military actors responsible for much of the violence.Filmed across four years, the documentary reassembles the arc of a revolution: the hope of the December 2018 uprising that toppled Omar al-Bashir, the sit-in at military headquarters demanding a democratic transition, the collapse of a fragile transitional government, and the descent into the war that has since displaced millions.It does so not through expert narration but through the words, poetry, and images of the young Sudanese who lived it, and it succeeds because Meddeb lets that lived experience carry the story itself.The film opens on a wall in a deserted street, painted with one of the revolution's mantras, the hero's blood is my blood, the emptiness eerie against the slogan's defiance.Over this, Meddeb's voice reaches her subjects as a wartime check-in: Voice notes to Maha Elfaki and Shajane Suliman, trapped in Khartoum in April 2023 as the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) tear the city apart, and a quiet observation that no one in France is talking about this war.Elfaki answers that the war has destroyed everything, that she cannot believe she will have to leave Sudan; Suliman says she no longer knows where home is.From this present-tense grief the film moves back through phone footage, the RSF downing a fighter jet filmed from behind a window, a wall of martyrs beneath the 1956 flag, and then further back, to the revolution's hopeful beginning.There, in interviews she films directly, the young activists show a clear grasp of Sudan's history and fault lines and a plan for what should come next.Their poetry threads through the film, carrying a generation's aspiration, fatigue, and fear.Meddeb is embedded throughout, yet she never appears on camera.We know her only as a voice, in conversation with the youth or occasionally narrating, a presence felt rather than seen.That restraint keeps the frame on her subjects and lets their jubilation fill it.In one of the film's most disarming moments, Khattab Mohamed recites a poem to her, and she asks, in delight, who wrote this.He taps his chest and grins, proud as a small child of his own work.It is a fleeting exchange, but it captures the revolution's early spirit: The sheer creative joy of a generation that believed a better Sudan was within reach.But the film refuses false uplift, and it documents pain long before the war arrives.