The Dislocation of Amber / Ughniyat touha al-hazina

Sat 26.09.
11:45

Cinema

Arsenal

The Dislocation of Amber (Intiza’ al Kahraman)

Filmed in the city of Suakin, a formerly flourishing port in Sudan, the film observes a place now reduced to ruins, a shadow of its former self. Shariffe uses symbols – scorpions, seashells, and camel caravans – to accentuate a sense of utter desertion. He interweaves an artistic tapestry using visual imagery, symbols, abstraction, and the melodic voice of the late Sudanese singer Abdel-Aziz Dawoud.
“Only faint traces of its ancient affluence are apparent today … a dimmed reflection in a cracked mirror; empty eyes with the stars in a different house, laughter in another room.” (Hussein Shariffe, 1974)

The film is presented as a new digital restoration, which was undertaken by the Cimatheque – Alternative Film Centre in Cairo, in 2025.

Sudanese filmmaker, painter and poet Hussein Shariffe (1934–2005) began his career as a painter, studying and working in London in the late 1950s and early 1960s. After a decade of lecturing and exhibiting in Sudan and internationally he turned to filmmaking, working at Sudan’s State Cinema Corporation and later heading the Film Section of the Department of Culture. Forced into exile in Cairo in the late 1980s, Shariffe continued his film practice and co-directed Diary in Exile (1993) with Egyptian filmmaker Atteyat Al Abnoudy. Until his death in 2005, he worked on the poetic, unfinished film essay Of Dust and Rubies.

Ughniyat touha al-hazina (Sad Song of Touha)

This early film by Atteyat Al Abnoudy paints a dreamlike portrait of artists that have influenced how we see the streets of Cairo. The unobtrusive camera captures fire- eaters, acrobats, musicians, child contortionists, and other performers, while the story of this community is told by the haunting voice of the poet Abdel Rahman Al Abnoudy.

We are showing the film in a digital restoration that was undertaken in 2025 under the auspices of the Cimatheque – Alternative Film Centre in Cairo.

Born in the Nile Delta to a working-class family, Atteyat Al Abnoudy worked from time to time as an actress to finance her law studies in Cairo. Before the backdrop of her work as a journalist and with numerous artists and authors already in her surroundings, she decided to study film at the Cairo Higher Institute of Cinema in 1972, where she became the first woman in Egypt to shoot documentaries. Renowned as a filmmaker dedicated to such themes as poverty, the oppression of women, and social injustice, her personal style (“no script, no actors, no direction, the camera follows the subject”) left a lasting impression on documentary filmmaking in Egypt.

Talal Afifi is a Sudanese film producer, curator, and writer, founder-director of Sudan Film Factory, producer of Khartoum (Sundance and Berlinale 2025), and is a core partner in the collaborative archive projects including Rewind Forward and UNREST. His work brings contemporary Sudanese cinema into conversation with its interrupted histories through production, programming, and the reactivation of endangered archives. Shaped by a long personal and artistic engagement with Hussein Shariffe, he approaches the archive as a living field of memory, care, and political imagination.