Hind Meddeb, the sentinel of the Sudanese revolt

She describes her departure, almost with the romanticism of a runaway: "I left on a whim, without a return ticket." In mid-May 2019, Hind Meddeb flew to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. The fall of dictator Omar Al-Bashir, overthrown the previous month in a coup d'état, ushered in one of those "moments of uncertainty" that the Franco-Tunisian documentary filmmaker loves: a popular uprising, a less restrictive police force, and possibilities opening up.

"There, it wasn't like Tahrir Square [in Cairo] or Bourguiba Avenue [in Tunis] ," explains the woman who filmed these two arteries at the heart of the "Arab Spring" for her films Electro Chaâbi (2013) and Tunisia Clash (2015). In Sudan, she "arrived in the middle of a sit-in, near the presidential district." "It was a city within the city, a true utopian city, with its artists' headquarters, its clinic, its school for street children, its library with 5,000 self-service books," she describes. She made a documentary about it, Sudan, Remember, in theaters May 7.

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