Ibrahim is back in the village he once left behind. He wants to show films. But “cinema is banned here, Ibrahim – they like playing football here,” reads the text in blue above the arid landscape. So the Sudan Film Institute organises a football match featuring four teams named after Elia Suleiman, Abbas Kiarostami, Ousmane Sembène and Abderrahmane Sissako. The winner gets to decide which film will be shown that evening. Before then, local peculiarities and bureaucracy must be overcome. And then war breaks out. “Nothing Happens After Your Absence” is the final part of Omer’s trilogy “After the Event or Post-Trauma”, which views Sudan as if suspended in time, keeping the war outside the frame. It appears in on-screen text, in children’s games and in conversations. With humour and satire, Omer gives an account of the violence that intrudes on everyday life and of cinema as a place of resistance and community.

Seggen Mikael

Jimena is in her twenties, a young woman who goes by the nickname La Pichi and grew up on the edge of Buenos Aires close to the port, the other side of the invisible line that separates centre from periphery. These are not mere descriptions, but rather how she tells it herself – her garrulousness knows no bounds, which makes her the perfect storyteller. Like a Scheherazade porteña, La Pichi tells a new story each night and there are so many it’s easy to lose count. With their extravagant titles, her stories of relationships, family, body issues and class might seem like tall tales, but they are all plucked from her everyday reality, the same reality lived on the fringes that we see in velvety nocturnal images during and in between her voiceover monologues, which are narrated with an infectious enthusiasm and humour that belies their ambivalent undercurrents: the tale of the boyfriend who didn’t want to be seen with her, the tale of the transvestite-loving grandmother who cooked glorious food she wasn’t supposed to eat, the tale of the father with vitiligo who at one point was no longer there. Yet this is no narrative of hardship and suffering, but rather one of irrepressible, inspirational joy, for what can be more empowering than being given space to chronicle your own biography on your own terms? As La Pichi herself says, “I wasn’t one word, I was many.”

James Lattimer