‘Goodbye Julia’ review: An operatic drama deftly tackles the story of a broken Sudan

Threats of violence hang over every interaction in Mohamed Kordofani’s Sudanese opera drama Goodbye Julia. The Khartoum on display is accompanied by the roar of gunfire, the screams of bodies burned alive and the ringing of makeshift houses being seized. So it’s a shock, but not necessarily a surprise, when the distracted woman hits the child with her car. The moment happens quickly: the child falls to the floor; a father finds the body and cries; the woman withdraws; a chase ensues.

What should a father do if he sees that his child has been hurt? He gets on his motorcycle and follows the panicked woman. He yells at her to stop, wait, explain. She can’t just leave his injured child on the street. But this is Sudan in 2005, another civil war is over and secession is on the horizon. The woman has brown skin and is from the north. The man has a dark complexion and is from the South. They coexist in Khartoum, but the city does not see the northerner and the southerner equally. The country is ravaged by racism: this scene, of the man on a bicycle, the woman frantically calling out to her husband, is not favorable to him.

So again, it may come as a shock, but not necessarily a surprise, when the wife finally comes home and her husband, fearful of the Southerners he so casually refers to as savages and slaves, shoots the father dead. According to witnesses, Santino (Paulino Victor Bol), the dead man, was hostile and dangerous. Mona (played with understated severity by Eiman Yousif) doesn’t know how to tell her husband Akram (Nazar Gomaa) what led to the chase. Wracked with guilt, she decides to find Santino’s family and to do penance anonymously.

Goodbye Julia threads the tense politics of a divided nation into the detailed tapestry of a quiet domestic drama. The Sudanese feature film is a first for the official selection of Cannes, but it stems from a rich film tradition. Sudan’s film history includes the work of African film pioneer Gadalla Gubara and recent projects such as Suhaib Gasmelbari’s Talk about trees and that of Amjad Abu Alala You die at twenty. Kordofani’s film stands out from today’s pack as a narrative feature that attempts to grapple with the segregation and discrimination faced by South Sudanese.

The seams of Goodbye Julia are held together by the delicate web of Mona’s conflicting emotions and actions, which fluctuate between misguided and well-intentioned. Kordofani, with the help of cinematographer Pierre de Villier, binds viewers to Mona through a generous use of intimate close-ups. Her face becomes a canvas, revealing the depth of her gnawing regret and steely determination. Yousif, a Sudanese theater actress and singer, certainly meets the demands of her character’s emotional range. The weight of guilt weighs on Mona, who decides for too long that lying is the only way to relieve the pressure.

Mona goes in search of Santino’s widow, Julia (Siran Riak, in her debut role), while the latter is selling goods on the street. Julia does not recognize Mona and pays little attention to the woman’s idiosyncratic ways. Mona insists on buying an expensive amount of grain that Julia sells before asking her if she knows any maids. Transactions initially define the relationship between these two women: Julia takes the job as Mona’s live-in maid; Mona offers to pay Julia’s son, Danny (first played by Louis Daniel Ding, then Stephanos James Peter), to go to school. Mona does not tell Akram about her plans, although he does view her with some suspicion.

Julia never really stops looking for Santino. She goes to the police, who ignore her questions, and asks friends if they saw him. She fears he might be dead, then becomes enraged at the thought of him abandoning them. Kordofani sketches Julia less precisely than Mona. While there is a palpable desire on the part of the filmmaker to humanize her character, she can feel stiff at times. A rare moment of vulnerability – when a bereaved Julia opens caskets at a public funeral, hoping to find her husband – teases us with the possibility that the character could be more than Mona’s foil.

Goodbye Julia moves languidly from scene to scene, except for a one-off jump that takes the story from 2005 to 2010. Kordofani offers viewers a sense of both the great catastrophes and the silent silences in Mona and Julia’s lives. They strike up a friendship and Akram even takes Danny on as a woodworking apprentice. You see Kordofani working out his political ideas about the root causes of separation through the relationships in this household. Mona and Akram, whose marriage has already been rocky, argue more about their differing views. Mona accuses Akram of being racist, and Akram replies that his wife is no better than him: Julia is ultimately her maid and not her friend.

These conversations, inspired by Kordofani’s own upbringing, grapple with racism, religious tensions, xenophobia and what it means to build a national identity in the face of it all. In recent interviews, the director referred to his childhood – specifically growing up with people from the southern region of Sudan as domestic workers in his home – as a source of inspiration. This is evident in the way he navigates the shifting relationships between Mona, Julia, Danny and Akram, which occasionally take on an unrealistic romantic glow.

Kordofani arrives to crack that perfect facade towards the end of the movie, which doesn’t chart the way you’d expect. There’s no forced forgiveness or avoidance of anger here, thankfully, especially when Mona’s lies begin to unravel. But what unfolds makes you wish we had spent more time with Julia and Danny; quiet moments between mother and son might have strengthened our sense of them as individuals with their own desires and motivations. There are attempts to give Julia’s character more dimension through a love interest (played by Ger Duany), but that development feels rushed compared to the conversations Akram and Mona have about their own marriage.

Still, Goodbye Julia will bring Sudanese issues to life for the public. Kordofani’s fine direction balances the film’s different modes: it’s a drama, with shades of a thriller and a sense of its own politics. With its classic, accessible style, Goodbye Julia will certainly gain more support for the cinema of Sudan, a country full of stories to be told about its past and present.

As I watched the movie, my mind kept drifting to Julia, wondering about her childhood growing up in Khartoum and her feelings about which place to call home. Kordofani gestures to some of these questions all the time Goodbye Juliabut their answers could be the subject of their own movie.