Until 2011, Sudan was the largest country in Africa. The secession that created South Sudan represented years of tensions between the mainly Northern Muslim Sunni Arab population and the repressed African Southerners who were considered ‘savages’ by their Northern counterparts. Although the secession was relatively peaceful, the area has been a conflict zone for many years.
Director and writer Mohamed Kordofani uses a ‘personal is political’ approach to the turmoil by starting his film, Goodbye Julia, in 2005. Giving the audience two protagonists from the North and the South. Their relationship, born of violence, fear, and misjudgement, develops into something akin to connection. Albeit one that is characterised by the use and misuse of power and privilege.
Goodbye Julia begins in the kitchen of an upper-middle-class home in Khartoum. Mona (Eiman Yousif) is making breakfast for her husband, Akram (Nazar Gomaa). She sets everything out carefully and lights a cigarette so it is ready for him. Soon their day is in tumult as rioting Southerners take to the streets after the death of a politician. Provisionally safe behind their gates, Mona and Akram remain alert and wary. It isn’t long before Akram in holding a Russian rifle prepared to defend his property along with his neighbours.
In another kitchen in Khartoum, Julia (Siran Riak) is cooking breakfast for her husband Santino and young son Danny (Louis Daniel Ding). There is a knock at the door. They are being forcibly evicted from the property for being Southerners. Although Santino has never participated in a riot (he works at a photography studio) by mere dent of his race and religion he is considered a potential threat. Julia, Santino, and Danny find themselves living in a run-down tent city.
Mona was once a singer. She shrouds herself in a burqa and makes her way to a local jazz café to see the band she was once a member. Driving home she sheds what she has used as a disguise. Distracted she drives past the tent city and hits Danny with her car. Thinking she has perhaps killed him she doesn’t know what to do. Santino sees what happened and drags his still living son off the road and confronts Mona with her carelessness. She panics and drives away calling Akram for help as Santino follows her on his motorcycle just to get acknowledgment and an apology. Akram arms himself and shoots the unarmed man as soon as he steps on their property. The event is immediately covered up by neighbours and the local police and Santino simply ceases to exist. Julia is never informed of his whereabouts or fate. She becomes a widow without knowing it.
Wracked with guilt, Mona tracks Julia down with the help of a corrupt officer. She wants to offer her ‘blood money’ in way of reparation but to do so would mean that Akram possibly would face a murder charge. Instead, she hires Julia as their live-in maid and becomes an ‘Aunty’ to Danny. Although they now share a house, Mona cannot shake her racism built up through years of social conditioning. Julia is a servant. She and Danny have separate cutlery and crockery. They sleep in uncomfortable quarters. Julia, as Akram points out to Mona, does the duties that are beneath an Arab woman.
Akram not advocating for Julia nor Danny. He is discussing Mona’s hypocrisy as she suggests that Akram be less openly racist to them. In the same day Akram will be kicking a soccer ball with Danny, or teaching him woodwork, and then openly speaking about Africans in slurs. They are “slaves” – they are not to be trusted. They are a feral mob that need to be put down like dogs. They are a scourge.
Over a period of five years Mona and Julia become intimates uplifting one other. Danny (Stephanos James Peter), once a quiet observant child has grown into a sullen silence and resentment. The private school Mona paid for is a place where he is bullied relentlessly. Julia’s own education, again organised by Mona, is introducing her to a life of freedom she would have not experienced before. She is courted by a Sudan People’s Liberation Movement activist who repudiates Julia’s integrity as the secret Mona has been keeping inevitably becomes public. If Mona had told the truth, if she had allowed Julia to find her husband instead of bribing policemen to leave him as “unidentified” – Julia would not have had to search the numerous caskets of dead African Christian men at a mass funeral. Danny would not have searched for the small clue which topples Mona’s house of cards. Danny would not, in turn, renounce is mother for living with the people who covered up his father’s murder and be gradually seduced into the life of a child soldier.
Mona and Julia lie to each other. Yet the burden of truth rests with Mona. Because Akram is so controlling she learned to lie as second nature just to survive his backwards paternalism and patriarchal views. Julia is the one who encourages Mona to go out and sing – including having her join the African campus choir. Their cultures mix through the language of music and shared humanity. Kordofani celebrates what is beautiful in both cultures, but Mona and Julia’s relationship can never be one of absolute connection while Julia is a body bought with blood money. It is Julia who provides Mona and Ahmet with a surrogate son. It is Julia who cleans their toilet. It is Julia who pays for her material liberation with her pain.
Kordofani begins the film with a stopped clock. The hands don’t move. Outside the cage Mona exists in (like the birds Ahmet gives her) is a larger cage – Sudan itself. Although Mona and Julia manage moments of respite and commonality within the fraught political landscape, neither of them will truly be free of the circle of violence in Sudan.
Mona, the songbird finally sings, but the cost is her marriage. A price she is willing to pay because Julia has emboldened her. Julia blossoms and becomes a teacher. She is no longer a woman selling grains on the side of the road. Mona and Julia both celebrate and become liberated from traditions which have made them “other,” whether that be racism, poverty, or patriarchal oppression.
Kordofani’s focus might seem to be on Mona and Julia because they represent a complex hope. Yet the film is at its core about Danny. Even with “two mothers” from the north and south, he is the next generation and for him the betrayal is too great. He is angry.
Although Kordofani sets the film in an earlier era of unrest in Sudan, he is telling an urgent story as contemporary tensions rise. First time actors Eiman Yousif and Siran Riak fall so naturally into their roles as Mona and Julia it is astonishing. In even making the film Kordofani and his crew were taking risks. But that risk meant that genuine warmth and empathy is generated.
Goodbye Julia is beautiful and brutal, hopeful and hopeless. Perhaps the best depiction of Sudan itself. There existed an opportunity for reconciliation – but without admitting openly what the Arab population has done to the African population over hundreds of years – the hope withers. Yet, Mona and Julia as avatars for their race and religion see each other and they find a form of sorority in the commotion of ongoing discord.
Mohamed Kordofani tried to envision a country where women with tired eyes didn’t only observe the rot in the soil but imagined a tree growing from it where they could shelter. He had optimism because of the 2018 revolution. Goodbye Julia will likely never be seen in Sudan or South Sudan – but Kordofani’s exquisitely shot memory box reverberates. In Kordofani’s own words, “Perhaps one day we can see how our differences enrich us and connect us just as much as our similarities.” Goodbye Julia is a small light in maelstrom, yet the glow can be perceived.
Director: Mohamed Kordofani
Cast: Eiman Yousif, Siran Riak, Nazar Goma
Writer: Mohamed Kordofani
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